The competition for finance internships in North America is as intense as the morning rush hour on Wall Street. Getting in requires strategy and determination. Last year, a second-year UCSD student interned at Citi and eventually secured a return offer from their investment banking division.
Don’t think the university job portal is just a formality. Internships with companies like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs often get posted in the middle of the night. I know students who set alarms to refresh the page at 3 AM, and some have even snagged early interview slots with Blackstone. Career fairs aren’t casual meetups either. With a mini resume featuring your personalized QR code, your 30-second self-introduction has to grab attention, like CMU’s Alex, who started with, “I used Python to rebuild Buffett’s stock selection strategy,” and was immediately offered a second-round interview with BlackRock.
Resume crafting is an art. You can reframe your finance course assignment as “building a dynamic DCF model to track Tesla’s stock price volatility, reducing error rates to under 8%.” Even part-time work at a bubble tea shop can be elevated to “optimizing inventory turnover models to free up 15% more cash flow.” One student described managing a gaming guild as “leading a 200-person team to circulate millions in virtual currency daily” and landed an internship interview with a blockchain fund.
Interviews are ultimately an information battle. Simply memorizing the 400 typical investment banking questions is the bare minimum. The real magic happens in the details of a company’s financial reports. Download the latest quarterly report ahead of time and ask insightful questions, like “I noticed that your wealth management division’s AUM grew by 20% quarter over quarter—will interns be involved in designing new fund strategies?” This type of question can leave an interviewer visibly impressed. One student discovered that a Goldman Sachs MD had liked a post about ESG issues on LinkedIn, so during the interview, they brought up the challenges of valuing renewable energy REITs and was invited to the final round immediately afterward.
During your internship, keep your weekly reports brief and structured: “Completed the draft for Project X this week / Next week, I’ll focus on Model Y / Found data anomaly Z that’s worth investigating further.” As several MDs from top investment banks have said, this type of structured reporting can fast-track your path to full-time conversion.
The harsh truth of this game is: by the time you feel prepared, the opportunity has already passed. Take the case of a second-year UCLA student, who worked as a cashier at Walmart but used Excel to analyze foot traffic. Armed with hand-drawn charts, she barged into the office of a private equity bigwig during a campus lecture and is now the youngest analyst at KKR. In finance, the elevator never stops. You can’t afford to wait; you have to pry open the doors with your own fire axe.
Release time:2025-04-21
