Investment Banking Summer Internship Best Practices

First off, congratulations. These internships are not easy to get. I have a lot of insight I can share from my internship experience. I had two summer internships in New York City. The first one for 10 weeks, the second one for 9 weeks and I learned a lot through both. For context, I'm the first in my family to work on Wall Street, but not first to be in a corporate setting. The first thing I want to talk about is preparation. You are going to need to do preparation on your own if you want to go into the summer feeling extremely confident and to not feel super stressed about it. Honestly, I would start weeks and months in advance. You start your summer internship with one week of training, but it's quick and honestly, I loved using that week as a refresher from everything that I was doing on my own the months prior. I was really fortunate because I was in my school's Wall Street Scholars program. So through them, I was able to get access to like training the summer analyst class in the New York office was about 30, 32 people. And one of the things that I think helped the most was that during that first week, HR pretty much told us that they had spots for everyone to come on full time if we do well that summer. So that meant that there was not a competitive nature amongst all of us and we were actually collaborative and friendly and a lot of us got along with each other. I learned at different banks and firms can be very different. It might take you some time to get staffed up on a project that has like a ton of work while you're there. So use some of that downtime to network and ask people for coffee chats, get better at your technical skills, understand the layout of the team and really build lasting relationships. When you're on the job, some general best practices, always make sure that you're keeping it professional and that your responses to emails, calls, requests that come in, always double, triple check your work. I would reread emails two, three times, reread any projects that I was going to send, and then proofread it on screen because that's really helpful. Don't wait until mid-summer to check in and review feedback, ask for feedback after any major deliverable and show that you're working on that feedback and you're implementing it on new tasks. I feel like there's so much more I can share on what my internship process looked like in the summer, but those are a lot of the key things and then hopefully good enough to get you started. But if you have more questions, leave them in the comments and if I think of more stuff, I'll share them in videos.