Investment Banking Summer Analyst Review

Through my role as an Investment Banking summer analyst, I was staffed on various deal processes and projects - some were ad-hoc, such as small research tasks or client meeting presentations, but some were also long term. For instance, you might be staffed on a new or ongoing deal process (IPO, M&A, debt raising, or LBO), where you will work with a junior team to. push through a deal process. Involved in that may be pitches, presentations, modelling, and general research.

Yes - I would say the main 'hard' skills I learnt would be financial modelling - particularly benchmarking as well as for LBOs (DCFs tend to be used less in my experience). Further, you work on a lot of pitches so your attention to detail becomes very good (e.g. where to put footnotes, how to lay things out on a page, information consistency). As for soft skills, as part of the summer you do an intern project, which you have to defend to others in your team.

The first two weeks are training so you aren't given any responsibility here since you're just catching up on financial topics of interest (especially if you did a non-Finance degree or haven't done any internships before). Once you start, you are given quite a bit of responsibility - I was drafting slides by myself, and many times you are given instructions and meant to make the most of them (although of course people are very open to questions too). Very much a job where you can take responsibility if you feel you are competent enough!

I think you are given quite a lot of support and guidance during the internship - halfway through there is a formal feedback session with your manager and HR, and HR is also there to support you if there are any issues. Generally, most of the day to day support comes from the team - for instance, if you don't understand something, it is very easy to just ask on the junior group chat and get a response.

In July, the office is generally quite busy because most people go on holiday during August, so expect to have a lot of catch-ups / coffees during July rather than August. Everyone is very approachable and happy to speak to you, whether it be people on your team or outside - there are also networks for South East Asians which I was a part of, and that was great because you speak to people from different divisions of the firm.

I really enjoyed my internship, I think they do give you 'real' work in the sense that you are working directly with the junior team in tasks that you would be doing as a full time analyst. This means you are getting a true experience of what it's like with regards to how technical, client-based, and team-based the job is. I was also lucky in getting a wide range of staffing - a lot was execution based.

Yes

I would say in the interviews, there is a huge emphasis on culture fit - they want to make sure that you have good experiences outside of university and professional work as well. So I would come with some interesting features / things I thought about during each work experience I had previously, as well as some non-work related hobbies. It helps to make you more relatable as a coworker because they know that you would get along well with others on the team.