Must Interns Excel at EXCEL?
Have you found interns’ modeling proficiency to be mostly interchangeable, or do interns’ Excel skills vary a great deal? And can this impact the decision as to whether an intern eventually gets a FT offer?
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You can never know too much accounting or too much Excel.
Regarding accounting, would you recommend taking as many accounting classes as is feasible in college? In other words, is it more beneficial to emerge from college with more "market" knowledge, or more accounting knowledge? (I realize it would be ideal to have both)
Know your debits and credits, sources and uses, balance sheet and income statement and statement of cash flow well (and how everything connects). Also, have a decent understanding of tax laws and depreciation. Knowledge too far beyond that is not generally that useful, but the mentioned things are very useful.
The key to any job or promotion is to impress your boss and make his job easier; you’re going to do neither with subpar/mediocre modeling skills. If you’re going to do something, do it right.
Modeling is one of the key functions a young banker provides to his or her superiors -- you best be good at it.
You are supposed to gain modeling experience WHILE you are an intern. This is circular logic if you will. You expect an intern to be proficient at excel, you do not train him in excel, then how can he be proficient.
You analysts have a responsibility to help them. While someone said to impress your boss is to make his life easier is correct, but at the intern level you have to train talent.
So would you recommend taking a course (like Wall Street Prep) before starting a summer associate job?
it's up to the fulltime analysts/associates job to train
and its the responsibility of the summer analyst/associates to be prepared
to give you actionable advice, I would pay the $500 to take breaking into wall street
Cool, thanks for advice.
I'd strongly recommend this too. Their videos and activities are pretty thorough. Some schools also might teach a 1 credit Excel skills class, which would be ideal. If you have time, learning some basic VBA may help to write some macros that would help daily work a lot, saving time for others and showing it is a real value add and will get you recognized.
Breaking the circular reference, it may be the analyst's / associate's job to train you, but if I have the choice between an intern that I have to train from scratch, and an intern that is already competent... that's a pretty easy choice.
As much as I complain about all the crap analysts I've worked with, I've also learned some good stuff from some of them. Sometimes it's just a different function that wasn't in excel when I was an analyst, sometimes it's a better way to organise something. That said, as smart as you think you are in excel, there's always someone that knows more.
Freshman & Sophomore internships might not be so demanding on interns' excel skills. But if you're prepping for an Summer Analyst Position, then yeah, it's crucial to have excellent financial modeling skill.
Sophomore summer intern here and cannot stress further with the benefits from mastering excel.
Thanks. Always helpful to hear from someone in the trenches. And congrats on snagging a sophomore summer intern gig... can I ask how you got it? Was it through applying last summer, or through OCR? I'm just amazed at how early the recruiting process is (interviewing this summer for next summer).
Networked hard and had contacts to hand my resumes in. Got lucky though since the recruiting at my firm is not as organized as others.
Anyway I wouldn't necessarily assume you'll need to know everything. But it would certainly leave an impression that you'll get everything after being taught through once. At least for where I work now people are pretty understanding with the fact that college sophomores simply can't work as efficient as full time analysts.
Excel modeling and usage is probably one of the more important things to learn and get a hold of as an intern. It's quite a crucial skill in IB so you best learn as much of it while you have time. But then again, intern time is the best time to learn and polish your skills
Excel Question- pre-internship (Originally Posted: 04/25/2009)
I will be doing both investment banking and investment research (rotational program) this summer at a BB. Since I don't know much about Excel, I want to get a head start on it. I know that banks provide training for analysts, but I still want to do something before my internship starts. What books should I read/buy? Any good Excel books for ibanking/research. Thanks.
Not sure about "books" that teach you how to use excel, but I would suggest fooling around with excel a bit. Just try to familiarize yourself with some of the functionality. There's also likely resources if you google. The program isn't especially difficult to use, but rather there are keystrokes that you can memorize to speed up monotonous tasks. This is a document from Training the Street with some shortcuts you might consider memorizing: http://www.gottamentor.com/viewDocument.aspx?d=857
Thanks so much. I will definitely look into that. But are there any books that are designed for banking in general.
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