How to get a Finance Internship #Finance

the most important factor that will determine whether you get an Investment Banking offer or not is prior work experience and now that recruiting happens so early as early as your sophomore year the importance of internship experience has never been higher as absurd as it

sounds to be focused on getting a job already in your freshman or sophomore year that’s just the state of the game that’s how competitive these offers are and that’s how competitive you need to be if you want to stand out so in this CashNews.co we’re going to break down

everything you should be doing in order to land that first Finance internship your goal as a freshman or sophomore is to get a

style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance internship that has these three attributes you want an internship that is going to expose you to business or text-decoration: none;">Finance it’s way too ambitious to only want Hedge Funds or private Equity or venture Capital firms so you just want any kind of job that will expose you to business and

href="https://cashnews.co/finance" style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance in some capacity as long as you’re working with people who are relatively ambitious who have a knack for bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance and you’re touching some aspect of that business then you’re in a good spot you can’t ask for much more at the beginning of your career the second factor is that this internship should have a track record of past

interns going to Finance if it’s cool opportunity but people don’t actually end up breaking into bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance then it’s probably still not the best fit for you a weird example of this i think some international opportunities are not viewed as favorably as domestic ones so even though you might be working at a bank sometimes it’s

better to stay domestically where your experiences won’t be disCredited and the third thing is you want to target firms that have a loose recruiting process i think it’s pretty frustrating if you only go for these like fortune 100 companies because all of the recruiting

is done through web portals a lot of your recruiting efforts won’t be met with any real person so it’s not the best use of your time so what kind of magical firms exist in this cross section of attributes well one that i’ve talked about before and i’m going to keep talking

about are search funds i think search funds represent maybe the best place to intern because they’re often run by people who have ib or private Equity experience a lot of the times they need interns on the fly who are willing to do any kind of work and you’re getting a

really real look into a deal process or managing a company there’s also a great deal of them every single year hbs stanford and wharton are going to turn out at least 50 search funds so you should start emailing them as soon as they graduate other really popular routes i would say are private

wealth managers really small Hedge Funds with one or two people as well as merchant banks i think that these are all very common kind of firms that people consistently go to and ultimately place into banking or consulting so let’s talk about the three phases of getting really

any job the first phase is research and the first component is what i call running a careers precedent so you want to look at people who had the exact same profile as you and then see where they ended up you want to know what is in the realm of possible for someone in your position so what this

means is looking at the people who went to your high school looking at the people who are in the exact same program as you in university as well as the clubs you’re a part of how similar were your grades to them if you want a specific award or if you’re part of some kind of club see

where the alumni from these foundations and these programs went on to do because that gives you a base understanding for really what trajectory you’re on and if you don’t like that trajectory then you have to work backwards just like in a precedent transactions analysis and

href="https://cashnews.co/finance" style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance you have to look at people with successful outcomes and see what they were doing there’s really not that much science to this i would just go through linkedin look at 50

to 100 profiles of people a couple years older than you and track it in excel and why i think this is helpful is because it does a lot of the filtering data for you already rather than having to reach out and learn whether these firms even hire freshmen you’ll only be looking at companies

that have a history of hiring freshmen or sophomore in the past the next place i think is really logical to look is company databases so you can check places like crunchbase or h1b data to see who’s hiring as well as who’s raising funding if a firm is continuing to raise new funds or if

it’s a tech company and they’ve just done a round then they’re probably going to be very receptive to taking on new interns so once you’ve done the research part the next thing is to do outreach and we’ve covered this pretty extensively in our cold emailing CashNews.co

but i’ll just break down the key highlights you have to make sure that your resume isn’t trash the standard for resume is not incredibly high it just cannot be trash you can’t have spelling mistakes in your resume has to be formatted kind of within conventions to a reasonable

degree and you also need to make sure that you’re articulating in pretty plain english we do have a resume and cover letter course on our website which does have my Investment Banking and private Equity resumes if you’re interested next on this

checklist you need to have some evidence of Finance interest and experience you can’t just go from nothing to picking up a

style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance internship you need to be part of some clubs some kind of extracurricular or some kind of article or other way to express your interest you need to make sure that your cold email is professional and concise if

you’re reaching out a lot and you’re not getting a lot of hits it’s very possible that your cold email is a brick people aren’t actually reading it so you need to make sure that it’s skinny down and maybe get an older mentor to review it for you and lastly you cannot

forget this you have to follow up within two weeks you can’t just send an email once gotta make sure that you follow up again the third thing is to impress employers you need to be constantly building your own skills and improving your resume recruiting isn’t just a single period

that’s gonna happen even if you get the banking internship offer you need to continue to work on your resume and your skills to make sure you’re ready for buy-side recruiting or mba programs the journey in #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance is pretty long so you need to make sure you’re constantly revisiting the stage making sure that you’re always working on ways to impress employers as a student i think there are three ways that you can easily improve your resume in

the absence of work experience even if you’re a sophomore you can focus on a specific interest or niche that isn’t already covered at your school something like Cryptocurrency

emerging Markets private Equity or options could be something unique enough to get you that first internship something that’s also very popular is writing

href="https://cashnews.co/finance" style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance research a lot of people even up to the mba level spend their time writing seeking alpha reports i’ve honestly seen a lot of people who are trying to get into the hedge

fund industry publish a lot of content on seeking alpha or on reddit or value investors club and they’re really just trying to get their reps in and getting some validation from people online and the third thing and i put this third because i honestly think it’s less important than

everything else we’ve talked about you could always get a certificate something like the cfa level one one of the online classes at mit or harvard or the bloomberg Markets concepts

course something in this flavor that kind of just shows that you’re a self-starter is going to help round out your resume and the last step to do if you still can’t find a job after doing all of this is to lower your standards it is honestly pretty brutal out there i didn’t get a

very relevant internship in my first year so i can sympathize with people who are still struggling to get these kind of job offers but if you offer to work online or if you offer to work part-time or unpaid then you can really open up the horizon of what’s available rather than be in payroll

sometimes it’s better if you just negotiate to be paid one lump sum for the entire summer sometimes if you say that you’ll set up a scholarship program in which they award the amount of money then that can be also a way around conventional salary amounts so i think this does require a

little bit of creativity but by offering to work for unpaid you can kind of create a lot of new opportunities and open more doors i know it’s not available for everyone but it is a strategy that you can employ so i hope this advice is helpful for you i do think that the most important thing

really is to identify the targets that actually hire interns consistently and just continue to reach out to them and if you’re feeling down on yourself because you don’t feel like you’re making very much progress trust me i’ve been there and pretty much all my peers have

been there too but i would say that everyone who’s consistently employed these strategies over the course of months and years and make it a habit have all broken into banking and consulting this CashNews.co please remember to subscribe to the channel and i will see you in the next one