2020 Summer Intern Salaries
Hello Everyone,
Last summer interned in Sales & Trading intern in NYC and am curious as to how others are being paid at other Investment Banks. In order for us junior monkeys to have a chance at negotiating with HR, it's important to know how our peers are comparably being paid.
To accomplish this, I ask those reading this forum to share:
Firm name, Position
Salary Weekly or Hourly Rate
Year Internship Completed
BMO Capital Markets, Trading Products Intern
$1635 weekly
2019
Okay it's fine to compare but please do not try negotiating a summer intern salary with HR...
Who says hr has to have all the power? If I were to have 4 offers of similar stature firms, comp is what it’s going to come down to on where I’ll sign. Intern comp is an indicator of how they pay you full time. It’s never the wrong time to negotiate. Think back to college scholarships those are a negotiation as well. There’s some people who seek to grasp what they deserve and others who are complacent with what’s on their plate. That’s your choice to make and not for others
I wouldn’t recommend this for a few reasons:
1) As others have said intern comp at large banks is mostly hard set. Paying one intern more makes little to no sense as that can be disruptive to the class. For the person getting the slight bump, it is usually such a small amount of money that it doesn’t matter
2) I also don’t recommend choosing a firm (of similar “stature”) based on comp. Entry level comp is mostly similar (basically exactly the same across large banks) and the differentiator is in the bonus, which you won’t know about. You are going to do much better (read: get a higher bonus) working for people you like who will develop you, working on problems you enjoy. So it would be pretty short sighted to focus on the entry level comp
3) with that, your best route to a full time offer is through an internship, so be thoughtful about the company and teams you choose, you state that what firms pay you up front is an indicator of what they’ll pay you going forward, that’s only partially true, and if you have to negotiate with the firm anyway what do you think the next few years will be like (having the negotiate for every raise).
4) finally, depending on where you see yourself in a few years (hard to do out of college) you should be looking at the career trajectory (including comp) instead of the first number. I have seen this happen to many people (trying to get $20k extra now and losing out on $100k+ later).
I understand that this is a lot of money for new grads and that it is harder to look at the culture, the people, etc, but I would just warn against ignoring all these components for comp.