Summer Analyst Review

It was an overall pleasant experience. I had the chance to meet many great people, learn more about my industry and M&A in general, there were several interesting and fun events. The working hours were naturally not always pleasant but always manageable, plus I had most of the weekends free.

I received more than once positive feedback from my colleagues during the internship, and received increasingly more responsibility from them. The people in my team were overall very nice and I got along well with most of them. All in all, the culture and the environment is very good and everybody is respectful towards each other.

My senior mentor reached out to me several times to go for coffee and always made it clear that I could speak my mind and go to him whenever necessary. My staffer was also very helpful and always tried to check on how everything was going and that I wasn't neither over nor understaffed.

The days were mostly busy, although sporadically there have some period of downtime. The hours were generally not excessively long (about 15 hours a day) but there were periods of peaks with a few late nights in a row. Nevertheless, after the peaks I always had the chance to recover as the hours became more manageable again.

I was given some responsibility in the making of pitchbooks but did not have so much modelling exposure, and in particular no client exposure. However, I believe it's very rare in the industry for interns to have client exposure, so I was not disappointed about it. The modelling exposure could have been higher though.

I believe I have further internalized many finance concepts that will definitely help me in the rest of my studies. More than that, this experience will definitely be helpful for whatever I do next professionally - I had the chance to work with very intelligent people, learn a lot about finance and push my limits by working long and intense hours.