FT anxiety, advice appreciated
Non-target, accepted an ER offer at a top-BB after internship. Felt my performance in general was lackluster at best. This was compounded by a poor final presentation that really paled in comparison to the other interns. I built somewhat of a 'virtual' rapport with the team and I believe this is what ultimately enabled me to scrape by and secure an offer.
Since I've returned to college, I can't help but feel a weight on my shoulders. There's a building sense of anxiety around the ever-approaching start date, which I just can't seem to shake. Worried I'm not "quick" enough for the role. Confidence is extremely low at the moment and so I'd really appreciate any advice you could share with me about how best to move forward.
Thanks to everyone on WSO, I wouldn't have been able to initially secure the internship without everyone taking the time to share their experiences on these forums!
Can’t give you any advice from experience, but I would just say that you probably are being hard on yourself compared to how you view others. You would not have gotten the offer if you aren’t someone they think can help the team. Personally, I would just practice every day at things you feel “slow” at, read, and mostly be open to learning from those around you. You got this! Best of luck.
Thanks for the encouraging words!
Find ways to be useful, no matter how low value the task is. And also, just be a likeable person, that helps if your technical skills aren't too sharpened yet.
Then in the meantime, work on your technical skills on the side.
Keep a log of mistakes you make, and make sure you at the very least don't make the same mistakes again.
After 9 months to a year on the job, there are only that many permutations of the tasks in SS ER that you will be fine.
Great advice, thank you. Definitely agree with your point with regards to the task scope in SS ER. Thanks again, really appreciate it!
I wouldn't stress about this. Lots of successful people can recount intern experiences where they underperformed, and often times, recall this is a catalyst which actually helped them succeed in their FT role--myself included.
Maybe you're not as skilled at Excel yet, perhaps building slide decks or writing reports reports isn't something you have as much high-level practice with doing at this point. I certainly didn't in college. With ER, most positions outside of BB's don't even take many candidates right out of undergrad anyways, because they recognize it requires a couple years out of college to really hone these core skill areas.
The best way to shake this anxiety would be to start practicing. Whether you have money now to invest or not, start reading about companies in sectors you're interested in, and develop investment ideas. Build models for your own practice and use. Practice building DCFs and relative comp sets for their peer groups and develop an informed investment thesis on the stock. Read the 10k's and Q's. Reiterating these processes and doing it out of genuine interest for markets and operating models will propel you more long-term than any kid who happens to be able to model and write circles around you at the age of 21.
1) nobody cares if you're from a target or a non-target once you're in the seat. totally irrelevant.
2) the final presentation is a skills test only and doesn't really relate to what you do in the job. It's not a product the bank sells, so it's much less important than how you do on the actual work assigned to you by the team
3) those two things are behind you and even though you didn't feel that strongly about them, they were clearly good enough that you got the offer. Now you can think about them never again for the rest of your life! relax, you did it!
4) being fast is good but doing a good job is dramatically more important. quickly getting out a table with a messed up sum formula that shows a misleading result, or rapidly sending your analyst a problematic table that she has to spend an hour fixing, is much worse than doing the job right the first time. Focus on doing things well and trying not to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, and you will naturally get a lot quicker at the things you do every day while saving your team time from doing things right the first time around.
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