Northwestern Mutual

I hope this is a joke. For your own good..

Yeah you'd be better off trying to go to one of the old school smile and dile brokerage firms down on Wall Street if you really want to do cold calling. At least with those guys you're working around equities and potentially for the capital markets side of a boutique investment bank. Examples being: Spartan Capital, Fordham Financial, Think equity. I'm not too sure but I also think these guys might sponsor you for your 7 and 63 before you graduate which would make the internship so worth it hahaha.

I can copy you my Glassdoor review:

I'll start this out with a description for anybody who may be wondering. Before you start the internship, you're tasked with obtaining your location specific life insurance/annuities/accident/health insurance license. They pay for that license, but I will say I personally found it an absolute pain to study for because I was already managing a 20-credit course load when they emailed me about it (I pulled either 1 or 2 all-nighters trying to knock out the course they provided, but I definitely wouldn't say that's a requirement). You can later get your SIE (Securities Industry Essentials), Series 7, and Series 63 licenses paid for (which are very good to have so early in this industry) but they don't allow that unless you make it through one semester or summer term and stay with them for the next. At my location, we began with a week long training. The training may vary greatly throughout different locations but mine consisted of a ton of presentations and honestly some very informative preparation for our roles. They went over prospecting (tactics to get people you know or that you've worked with already to give you more names/numbers to call), phoning (what to say when you're trying to schedule meetings with people over the phone), compensation statistics (such as how many people you'd have to call and meet with to make X amount of money), and lots more. We did actual live phoning session competitions where we compared our results (how many people we were able to "reach" and how many people we were actually able to schedule meetings with) and the winner was rewarded with some amount of money. They also place extremely heavy emphasis on organization and very loosely and somewhat unhelpfully guide you in how to do that (by setting up your "ideal calendar") The actual internship consisted of phoning, which as I previously stated is calling people to try and set meetings with them. The other main thing was actually meeting with those clients which is accompanied by a joint work partner. Joint work partners are full-time financial representatives that essentially conduct the meeting on your behalf, allowing you to shadow them to take notes and pick up on what you would say if you were in the meeting alone. Intern commission is 50% so if the prospect decides to purchase a product, you get 50% of their first year premium. Using simple numbers, this means if the prospect buys a life insurance policy that costs them $100/month, one year worth of premium would be $100 x 12 months = $1,200 and the intern would get 50%, so $600. Except if you had a joint work partner (which you will always have at the beginning and likely the entire time unless you're killing it) you split it 50/50 with your joint work partner - meaning you would get $300 instead of $600.

Pros

• Very structured training process.
• "Potential" to make a lot of money as an intern (though very, very, very, very few do) albeit much less than if you did so as a full time rep for the reasons specified above.
• Before starting the internship, I put my new life insurance license on my resume, and scored a much, much better internship at a way better company for the following summer. It may or may not have had anything to do with the license, but I was able to talk about it in my interview so there's at least that.
• Contrary to almost every single other 1-star review on this company - I'll preface this by saying this could very likely be specific to my location/situation and I don't for a second doubt that this was an issue for the other people posting reviews - They don't actually technically make you sell insurance to your friends/family members. They do however make you reach out to those people (starting before you even get a second interview, mind you) to ask them for referrals, as in people they that you could call and push insurance on instead.

Cons

• Pay is $100 per week + commission. The $100 weekly stipend is only for the first 10 weeks (at least for semester terms, can't say for summer) and they are contingent on you attending a weekly 1 hour "development" session. They will 100% upsell you on the fact that theres "no limit to the amount of money you could make" but they will by no means ever talk about the fact that you could spend hours upon hours every single week for several months while literally only making that $1,000 from the weekly stipends.
• Independent contractor. They love to use those buzz words like "you're a business owner" and "you're starting and running your own business" but all this really means is you have to pay a lot more taxes and they aren't required to give you any benefit that an employee would get. That $100 you're getting paid is subject to your usual income tax + FICA, but because you're self-employed you pay the companies end of FICA meaning 7.65% is actually 15.3%. As a college student it's relatively safe to assume you're in the lowest tax bracket which as of today is 10%, bringing every single $100 your highly paid intern-self is going to make down to $75. Make sure you put that money aside from the start, especially if you perform well and make any amount of commission.
• Upselling potential compensation. This is more-so regarding the compensation for full-time representatives, but as I mentioned they talk a lot about the statistics surrounding how much money you could make in this business. You'll see presentations with 5-year plans to making $300,000/year, you'll see ratios for making $500,000/year, and in all honesty it's pretty exciting. But don't let them fool you... there's no consistent way to get rich quick - it takes a lot and for those of us who don't happen to be on a first name basis with 10 trillion people that we can just call up out of the blue and sell $10,000/month policies to.. it's probably not going to happen.
• Strong networks are favored. Branching off my last point, if you're a regular college student who doesn't have a ton of people you can just call, then it's going to be way harder for you. And for students with wealthier families, it's going to be a loootttttttt easier because you probably have several people in your immediate family know some people. Some other wealthy, I mean.
• Very unstructured shifts/hours. They pay you that weekly stipend to avoid paying you an hourly wage which either forces you to either work very little (defeating the purpose because then you can't make any commission) or work wayyyy too much (while still possibly not making any commission) or if you're like me, you completely crumble into pieces when trying to schedule yourself and end up getting stressed out all the time dealing with opportunity costs (hanging out with friends vs work, going out and doing fun things vs work, or literally just balancing studying/homework vs work) to the point that instead of doing either of those things, you end up doing neither... I don't know about you other college students, but classes alone are already kind of a lot of work.
• Superiors who talk down on own career. During my second interview, my interviewer (who ended up being my direct leader) answered my industry-related question "With your clients, do you actively manage your clients portfolio?" by explaining the role of support people in the home office in Milwaukee and saying, and I quote, "Yeah... they're a whole lot smarter than you or me." Now I don't know about any of you reading this... but I don't necessarily know that I want to be selling myself short to the point that I'm interning for a position with a boss who is telling me that someone working in a position at their same level is way smarter them. And I also found that extremely rude because they equated my intelligence with their own with a negative connotation without knowing the slightest thing about me or my life.
• Sketchy superiors. One of my main joint work partners was telling me about an extremely wealthy (six figure monthly income) prospect they recently got a meeting with and they casually explained this situation in which the prospect was being blatantly to. They made up a complete lie when the prospect asked how much AUM (assets under management) they had. My joint work partner worked almost exclusively with life and disability insurance, so they likely had $0 in AUM, but instead of being honest they blurted out the number $25 million which evidently gained the prospects trust. They then tried to justify this dishonesty by saying they planned on bringing in a joint work partner of their own who did have roughly that amount of AUM. Not to mention just before that I received a company email with some training video about honesty and integrity. This same person reached out to me months after I finished to try to get me to buy life insurance. I'm the fool for thinking they were reaching out to check on me LOL.

I would personally say having no internship is better than interning at NWM. The reputation is so bad that it could be seen as a negative when applying elsewhere. Also this applies to all positions, I think they have a private capital arm which is probably a legit business, but it’s still not worth staining your resume

I'd agree with other posters that this could be a negative on your resume. If I was reviewing resumes and saw someone listed northwestern mutual, it can only go two ways: You were bad at your job, which makes me wonder why you put it on your resume, or your were good at your job.. which makes me assume you have no social skills and didn't feel your skin crawl while working for a pyramid scheme.

Had to drop this gem

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ctz7m8QAHwb/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==