Most Wall Street interns treat the summer like a final exam: keep your head down, nail the work, hope the offer to follows. No doubt the work product is important, but here’s an area where your career services office on campus falls flat: networking. In an AI world, your in-person communication skills and judgement can set you apart from a deep pool of candidates.
From the beginning of time, the guidance has been to send vaguely worded emails “asking about someone’s experience” and a request to grab coffee to as many people as possible.
Networking requires being targeted, playing the long game and not coming across as transactional. If you are a transactional person well, fake it 🙂 Not much I can help you with there.
Here’s are steps that you can take this summer to differentiate yourself on the job so when you go back to campus, your colleagues will think of you first when discussing who to bring back for full-time.
Internship networking playbook (investment banking analyst):
1) Do Your Homework - Find out where current full-time IB analysts are going after their 2-3 year program ends (private equity, hedge fund, Silicon Valley etc). After building a rapport with full-time colleagues, ask them. People like talking about themselves - ask how they heard about the post-IB analyst opportunity and what else they were considering. You get the the entire lay of the land.
2) Reach Out With Intention - After you gather intel on which coverage groups or product areas placed analysts on the buyside etc. Reach out to senior bankers within that coverage group saying you are interested in their group for a specific reason (e.g. “I’m interested in financial sponsors as I can see get exposure to a wide variety of industries rather than focused on just one industry”). See if they are willing to meet and offer to stop by their office, AM usually better. When meeting cite some news in their sector from that morning and have an opinion on it and ask what they think it means for their sector. You will come across as informed and already in the industry - this is key.
3) Keep in touch - Post meeting, send a thank you note (two line email, nothing more). This is rare and no one does it. Once back at school send an article about once or twice a semester that you think is relevant to their industry (and meaningful). No stale headlines - something that comes out the same morning. Send within hours if you can and give your opinion as a one line cover note in the email. People rarely put in the work to follow up and keep in touch - keep a spreadsheet that tracks the people you met and the last time you got in touch with them. It’ll pay off.