first year internship prospect for the wall street hopeful

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
1

<p>Hi,</p>

<p>What are the prospects for the U Chicago freshmen in the investment banking/financial sector, either during the school year or at the end of the freshman year? Obviously, if it's during the year, it will have to be in Chicago. As for the summer internship, I prefer NYC. I am a determined Wall Street hopeful, and will major in economics should I go to U Chicago.</p>

<p>Does the school (career advisory organization, etc) help highly motivated freshmen to get positioned for the summer internship positions?</p>

2

<p>Second year spots with mainstream banks are pretty hard to get, first year spots are effectively unheard of at any school unless you are: working directly for a relative, in operations (i.e. paper pusher), doing private wealth management (i.e. secretarial type work for a branch level wealth advisor), or paid to be placed at some institution that is willing to throw you some grunt work (e.g. University of Dreams). Same goes for term time options.</p>

<p>As it is, most people who have internships as a second year are working for off name boutiques or regional banks, again, often in in PWM or Ops. Ultimately, the real make or break is getting something substantive prior to the fall of your senior year, so either junior term time or the last summer before recruiting. Having interned with more than one financial institution is always a plus.</p>

3

<p>thanks for the input. this is very helpful. I guess I was way too optimistic/unrealistic. </p>

<p>How about Federal Banks, like New York Fed? Is an internship with one of these a good preparation for Wall Street prospects?</p>

<p>Given your input above (even a second year internship in the financial sector is difficult to get), what are good options for Wall Street hopefuls for the summer or in semester internship before the start of the junior year? I was hoping something more relevant than Starbucks…</p>

4

<p>Federal Reserve banks are significantly more selective than the average Wall Street firm, since their PhD level hiring committees <em>closely</em> examine your academic record, and also want two to three recommendations from professors (preferably ones they recognize offhand from field literature). In general, the better Fed offices are feeders to the top ranked PhD and quantitative MA / MS programs, and to a lesser extent elite JD and MBA programs. Operations positions aside like information technology and accounting, you definitely have to be a solidly honors bound student, at a selective college, with the right mix of relevant coursework. As a result, there tends not to be a lot of overlap between the Fed types and the plain vanilla banking crowed. The former often live in the library, while the later are frequently the relative life of the party at UChicago. All-in-all, from a non-compensation perspective, an RA or analyst type role at the San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, New York, or Washington fed offices, along with the IMF and World Bank in DC, are vastly more prestigious and analytically demanding than working for Barclays or Citigroup. The Fed is up there with Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, the White House, DE Shaw, Google, etc. in the stratospherically elite bracket of employers. </p>

<p>So as for what to do for you freshmen and sophomore summers…</p>

<p>If you are not utterly exhausted academically by the spring, I suggest just knocking off some of the core over your first summer (2-3 courses, definitely not 4, also avoid taking the condensed economics sequences), which will allow you to drop to one or two classes later on for a term while working downtown. Incidentally, if you can only find a position that is full time during the regular school year, you can choose to take GSB accounting, since it only meets once a week and there are night sections starting at 6 PM or so based out of Booth’s downtown building. </p>

<p>As for you second summer, that is where it can be worth it to really hustle for a banking or fortune 500 corporate finance gig, even if it is kind of weak in terms of the actual responsibilities or the learning curve afforded. As much as it pains me to say it, I think going through one of the fee charging programs (again, University of Dreams comes to mind) that can place you with a brand name institution is worth it, unless you are able to drudge up something on your own. Having something as a sophomore guarantees you something as a junior, which in turn guarantees you a full time job as a senior under normal market conditions. So – arguably a testament to how poorly designed Wall Street recruiting is –a one time, 8K payment for the opportunity to work unpaid for a summer can end up being as make or break as attending a top school or attaining a certain GPA.</p>

5

<p>S1 had a chat with some folks at the DC Fed last year. They do their summer internship hiring for students who have completed their soph year. The competition is extremely competitive, as one might expect. Exceptions to this protocol are extraordinarily rare.</p>