Alternatives to IB for summer after junior year

So with the recruiting season basically over and not getting past first round interviews at any banks/AM firms, I'm wondering what are other good alternatives for the summer. F500 corp dev? Boutiques? If I could get any sort of guidance on how to move forward that'd be great.

 

I think that for EB and BB you are late now. Most firms finished (or are close to finishing) their recruiting.

However, many other firms still actively recruit., think of smaller valuation shops, PE, corp development, Big4, etc.

I guess that you are US, in case not, keep in mind that many firms in Europe are must less structured in their recruiting process and positions for the summer are still open for quite some time. Especially in mainland Europe

 

The first shot we be at boutiques, however, the recruitment is also incredibly competitive.

Besides that I can recommend smaller valuation shops or financial advisory departments of Big4. Big4 usually have many interns for a variety of positions, from valuation teams to M&A and transaction services. Thus you should also be able to learn good skills that you can showoff in your interviews next year when applying for IB.

From personal experience, I can tell you that if you are a big lucky, such internships can turn out great. The reason is that people are often more "relaxed' than in IB and might take more time to show you stuff and you ll learn a lot. Of course keep in mind that (as always in life) you got to be a bit lucky with team, culture, MD, dealflow etc..

Another thing that you should not underestimate for small shops is the great deal flow. I completely agree that they are less prestigious and the work (often) much less deep in terms of analysis, however, as an intern you want to have a lot of deal flow and usually small shops have much higher deal flow because they just take all deals they can find. And even if deals are small, who cares if in the top left corner of your excel sheet you have $bn $m $k ?! You will definitely get more exposure in that sense and if the firm sees that you are good you will have a lot of responsibilities too.

 

@Opalais15", you should have searched on WSO. This has been answered many times, but what I would suggest you do is to start reaching out to boutiques. Charlotte has plenty, Atlanta has even more. I typed up a list of investment banks in Charlotte in the thread below a while back:

http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/ib-presence-in-charlotte

 

The ones that come to mind are PE, HF, VC, boutique banks, corporate and commercial banking. Smaller shops tend to be less bureaucratic and more open to the idea of having an unpaid summer analyst. Even a no name boutique can be very helpful as it demonstrates a level of interest and should familiarize you at least in broad strokes.

 

Freshman summer is not super important but I would try your best to get something at a small boutique doing M&A, preferably in NYC. A lot of people who work full-time at BBs/EBs now went that route during college and you can ask them about it (this is how I ended up securing my boutique spot last summer as a sophomore).

If you can get a boutique internship freshman summer you can probably shoot for a larger MM bank sophomore year (something like BMO or RBC is within reason as I know a few from targets who worked at these places soph year, non-diversity), and then you are pretty likely to receive BB/EB interviews across the street as a junior.

 

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