<p>Hi,</p>
<p>Just wondering what's the value, if any, of an internship with Merrill Lynch at a branch office. Basically, as you probably know, it's financial advising.</p>
<p>I recently got an offer -- but it is unpaid! Is it worth it? Any thoughts will be appreciated.</p>
<p>Cheers,</p>
<p>WF</p>
<p>Hey I'm interning here right now. Today was actually my first day and I'm going to do it for the summer. Basically, I'm just hoping to use this as a way of leveraging myself to getting a better internship later, I figure the ML name might help for something. I'm only a freshmen so I figure they will be room for bigger and better internships.</p>
<p>Since they require credit I'm going to get a free A from my school so that's okay -- but my school wants me to do 30 hours a week with them!</p>
<p>The director with our group seems pretty nice though, he's going to bring some i-bankers to come talk to us, so that should be good too and they're intent on taking us to client meetings</p>
<p>How did you get that position?</p>
<p>Read the recent NYTimes OP-Ed on Unpaid Internships...then judge for yourself! (Seriously, everyone should read it!)</p>
<p>lol</p>
<p>They force the school credit on you, so they don't have to pay you b/c you are already "benefiting" from school credit. I thought it was funny -- I don't want/need the school credit. I don't mind the extra "A," though.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, I think it's a good opportunity to learn the basics. I just hope I won't spend my time (definitely not all of it) photocopying and binding reports. Lunch is free daily, so at least there's a perk:). My director was pretty nice, too; I am just wondeing if he'll remain that way. I am not sure I want to put up with too many mundane tasks.</p>
<p>Are doing the internship in Texas? PM me. </p>
<hr>
<p>Any thoughts will be appreciated, guys.</p>
<p>Cheers,</p>
<p>WF</p>
<p>Op-Ed Contributor
Take This Internship and Shove It
E-MailPrint Save </p>
<p>By ANYA KAMENETZ
Published: May 30, 2006
MY younger sister has just arrived in New Orleans for the summer after her freshman year at Yale. She will be consuming daily snowballs, the local icy treat, to ward off the heat, volunteering to help clean up neighborhoods damaged by Hurricane Katrina and working part time, for pay, at both a literary festival and a local restaurant. Meanwhile, most of her friends from college are headed for the new standard summer experience: the unpaid internship.</p>
<p>Number Seventeen, NYC
Instead of starting out in the mailroom for a pittance, this generation reports for business upstairs without pay. A national survey by Vault, a career information Web site, found that 84 percent of college students in April planned to complete at least one internship before graduating. Also according to Vault, about half of all internships are unpaid. </p>
<p>I was an unpaid intern at a newspaper from March 2002, my senior year, until a few months after graduation. I took it for granted, as most students do, that working without pay was the best possible preparation for success; parents usually agree to subsidize their offspring's internships on this basis. But what if we're wrong?</p>
<p>What if the growth of unpaid internships is bad for the labor market and for individual careers?</p>
<p>Let's look at the risks to the lowly intern. First there are opportunity costs. Lost wages and living expenses are significant considerations for the two-thirds of students who need loans to get through college. Since many internships are done for credit and some even cost money for the privilege of placement overseas or on Capitol Hill, those students who must borrow to pay tuition are going further into debt for internships. </p>
<p>Second, though their duties range from the menial to quasi-professional, unpaid internships are not jobs, only simulations. And fake jobs are not the best preparation for real jobs. </p>
<p>Long hours on your feet waiting tables may not be particularly edifying, but they teach you that work is a routine of obligation, relieved by external reward, where you contribute value to a larger enterprise. Newspapers and business magazines are full of articles expressing exasperation about how the Millennial-generation employee supposedly expects work to be exciting immediately, wears flip-flops to the office and has no taste for dues-paying. However true this stereotype may be, the spread of the artificially fun internship might very well be adding fuel to it.</p>
<p>By the same token, internships promote overidentification with employers: I make sacrifices to work free, therefore I must love my work. A sociologist at the University of Washington, Gina Neff, who has studied the coping strategies of interns in communications industries, calls the phenomenon "performative passion." Perhaps this emotion helps explain why educated workers in this country are less and less likely to organize, even as full-time jobs with benefits go the way of the Pinto. </p>
<p>Although it's not being offered this year, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s Union Summer internship program, which provides a small stipend, has shaped thousands of college-educated career organizers. And yet interestingly, the percentage of young workers who hold an actual union card is less than 5 percent, compared with an overall national private-sector union rate of 12.5 percent. How are twentysomethings ever going to win back health benefits and pension plans when they learn to be grateful to work for nothing?</p>
<p>So an internship doesn't teach you everything you need to know about coping in today's working world. What effect does it have on the economy as a whole? </p>
<p>The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not identify interns or track the economic impact of unpaid internships. But we can do a quick-and-dirty calculation: according to Princeton Review's "Internship Bible," there were 100,000 internship positions in 2005. Let's assume that out of those, 50,000 unpaid interns are employed full time for 12 weeks each summer at an average minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. That's a nearly $124 million yearly contribution to the welfare of corporate America. </p>
<p>In this way, unpaid interns are like illegal immigrants. They create an oversupply of people willing to work for low wages, or in the case of interns, literally nothing. Moreover, a recent survey by Britain's National Union of Journalists found that an influx of unpaid graduates kept wages down and patched up the gaps left by job cuts. </p>
<p>There may be more subtle effects as well. In an information economy, productivity is based on the best people finding the jobs best suited for their talents, and interns interfere with this cultural capitalism. They fly in the face of meritocracy you must be rich enough to work without pay to get your foot in the door. And they enhance the power of social connections over ability to match people with desirable careers. A 2004 study of business graduates at a large mid-Atlantic university found that the completion of an internship helped people find jobs faster but didn't increase their confidence that those jobs were a good fit.</p>
<p>With all this said, the intern track is not coming to an end any time soon. More and more colleges are requiring some form of internship for graduation. Still, if you must do an internship, research shows you will get more out of it if you find a paid one. </p>
<p>A 1998 survey of nearly 700 employers by the Institute on Education and the Economy at Columbia University's Teachers College found: "Compared to unpaid internships, paid placements are strongest on all measures of internship quality. The quality measures are also higher for those firms who intend to hire their interns." This shouldn't be too surprising getting hired and getting paid are what work, in the real world, is all about.</p>
<p>Anya Kamenetz, a columnist for The Village Voice, is the author of "Generation Debt."</p>
<p>I think it's pretty normal to have unpaid internships. I'm not really expecting one till I hit the summer between jr. year and sr. year.</p>
<p>PM'ed you WF</p>
<p>I thought the OP-ed article was, more or less, garbage. The guy bashes at everybody, immigrants, capitalism, corporate America, parents, job satisfaction, snoopy -- ok, maybe not at snoopy. What an unhappy human being:D.</p>
<p>to the OP, Merrill Lynch's name will probably help you.</p>
<p>dcfca, how did you apply for this position? </p>
<p>I'm a first year too, interning at a trading firm in Manhattan. it's paid though. I was gonna do something with UBS for credits, but UVa doesn't let first years do internship for credis, how weird...</p>
<p>the position was posted on the internship board at my school, I had to actually finish 31 credits before being able to receive the internship class, it takes a minimum of 30 completed hours to be a sophomore and I had completed 40 hours worth of credit alone at school by that time.</p>
<p>Yeah, they asked for a year of college credits and GPA.</p>
<p>I wonder, though, if this is looked at as being the "redhead stepchild" side of Merrill Lynch. Like working at a McDonald brach vs. Corporate McDonalds, you know.</p>
<p>I know the legal profession is prestige obsessed; I wonder if it's the same with IBanks. Nevertheless, I think it'll be a fun experience from which I should be able to learn quite a few new things.</p>
<p>definitely isn't super prestigious but it does teach some basic skills, gives some credibility for your resume. as long as it isn't the only internship you have you should be good. i'm just going to try to spin it as showing i have a major interest in finance when I apply for some interviews with Hedge Funds during the school year and for next summer.</p>
<p>it's a pretty interesting experience, that's for sure.</p>
<p>dcfca, the name "Merrill Lynch Global Private Client" can fool lots of people. it looks...........important.</p>
<p>lol, but who are those it'll fool? Not top business schools or Ibank recruiters. I don't really care about the post-office people or the librarian.</p>
<p>Bump...again, any input for people with experience in the industry would be appreciated, or those in business school, etc. Thanks, guys.</p>
<p>I sent my resume to two places: an investment bank and a small marketing group. The investment bank never replied (I'm a freshman - and I sent it kind of late) - but the marketing group did. </p>
<p>I'm currently at the marketing group and I'm very happy. I make about $12/hr and I'm actually learning meaningful stuff. I think starting out at a smaller company is better. This way you can head your own projects and pick up important traits needed to climb the corporate ladder later in life. </p>
<p>Just my two cents.</p>
<p>The important thing is to know that those in the know will understand a job in a branch office on the retail side is not an "ibanking job." This will not give you a foot in the door on Wall Street, and to be honest might almost work against you in getting an ibank job because most on The Street have a bad attitude about retail. So only do it if it really interests you.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The important thing is to know that those in the know will understand a job in a branch office on the retail side is not an "ibanking job." This will not give you a foot in the door on Wall Street, and to be honest might almost work against you in getting an ibank job because most on The Street have a bad attitude about retail. So only do it if it really interests you.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I think the only reason it would work against you would be if it was your only internship. But like I had said, if you use this internship to help you get other smaller internships and work your way up it's okay. Example-</p>
<p>summer between fresh + soph year --> PWM type internship
summer between soph+jr year --> BB/PE/regional ibank/boutique internship
summer between jr+sr year --> most important internship, the one that leads to FT</p>
<p>so if you go that path, I think it's fine. I've found alumni and people from big name schools (Wharton) who do the same type of thing.</p>
<p>Ok, so I got two more offers: Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney. Would it make any difference which one I choose?</p>
<p>MS may end up being paid, in which case I'll take it over the other two. </p>
<p>Again, even your most inner-thoughts are welcome:).</p>
<p>Let me explain. There is a huge snob factor where ibanking jobs are concerned. A ML has way more back office and retail people than they have ibankers. The ibankers consider themselves to live in a totally different world. Retail brokers are considered by them to be in a different industry. Ibankers couldn't imagine not paying you. Even when I was a high school intern they loved to throw money at us, there was just so much money flowing through and they wanted to intice us! We were given all kinds of gift certificates and bonus cash in addition to salary. My boss gave me a weekend in a suite at an amazing hotel in london after the work was done. They want to rope smart kids in. That any bank wants you to work free is troubling.</p>