Summer analyst investment banking Review

My role is to support the analysts and associates within the investment banking team I was allocated to. This means that my tasks vary a lot on a day to day basis. Depending on the project and client I worked on, it can entail researching certain assets of a company, analysing recent stock price developments, doing a cost-buy-in analysis, preparing company-profiles as well as analysis at various prices. Usually within the summer internship there is not a lot of modelling involved, but you might have to do some for your case-study. The case study is a project you get assigned during your first week at the desk and which you will need to present to some seniors. Usually this is used to benchmark the interns against each other.

Yes, I have learnt a lot of new skills. Next to multi-applicable skills like working in MS Office (especially PowerPoint and Excel), I have also learnt a lot in terms of processing of transactions, how to structure a pitch as well as interpersonal skills on how to interact with different seniorities within the team. I have also learnt quite a lot of modelling because my team asked me to build an LBO model from scratch for one company. Thereby I again learnt a lot about how the process of this is going about and what the best way of communicating with seniors is. Also I learnt how to handle different databases like Eikon, FactSet. Mergermarket, Filings Expert, Dealogic and Factiva.

I was given an appropriate amount of responsibility during my internship. During the end I could work on some projects like an analyst, which was especially important to me to see how the future workstreams would look like. However, it was good that I was not given any time-critical tasks, where me messing up the task would have a tremendous effect on the team, as this would have put too much pressure on myself and probably also on my associate. So I am quite happy about the level of responsibility. Oftentimes the slides that I would build were reviewed and then sent out to the clients a few hours after. That definitely gave me the impression of my work being important and valued.

I was given a lot of support and guidance by all levels of seniority. This is something that I especially enjoyed about my team – I felt like they were interested in supporting me in my learning process and always being available to answer questions. I only had one negative experience with regards to this working with one associate who was not very responsive and ignored some of my questions on a project. But this might have been due to the fact that he went on vacation a few days later and had a lot of things to finish, while I was working as an analyst on this project.

While one has to note that this is obviously the culture or investment banking which comes with a lot of stress, time-pressure, long hours and drive for excellence, I would describe the overall culture as very nice. People were very approachable, interested and helpful. It was a very collaborative work environment where a lot of emphasis is also placed on efficiency. You can see that people think about which workstreams are really necessary and thereby try to enable juniors to have a decent work-life-balance if business allows it. There is also a strong culture among juniors to know deadlines and avoid being given fake tight deadlines.

The internship was a great opportunity for me to dive into investment banking. It provided me with the insight to know I want to do investment banking eventually, while giving the opportunity to get to know many inspiring people and get insights into different business departments, their daily work and how JPM as a company works. Even though the working hours were intense, I felt like people generally took care of us and wanted us to go back home early if there were no more things to do. Also working from home was made possible, while I did not take advantage of that too often, because it is hard to have a proper work-from-home set-up put together for an internship abroad.

Yes

Talk to your peers about their approach, exchange CVs and give each other advice. It is good to practice for interviews together. For us, the question which would be discussed in a group was already provided 24h in advance, so we could get the chance of preparing. Use that time wisely and read a lot about the topic. The time before can be used already for thinking about the strategy you want to use during the discussion to make a good impression. For the interviews I was not asked any technical questions. I was asked about commercial acumen – i.e. describing what is going on in one sector right now. Apart from that I also got a brainteaser, which on can prepare for using different websites.