Cambridge University student with 8 bank spring weeks dispenses advice
It’s the tail-end of application season if you want to do a spring week at an investment bank. If you don’t know what those are, it’s a bit late to find out, but they’re basically week-long insight days hosted by banks for first-year students, usually in London, that also often come with a summer internship offer.
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Students can apply to as many spring internships as they want, and can do more than one if the timings match. A few years ago, LSE student God’sFavour Oluwanusin had nine spring internships. A few years before that, another LSE student named Haydn had eleven. Haydn is now a director in Barclays' debt capital markets (DCM) team.
This year, in a perhaps more competitive application environment, Cambridge student Daniyaal Anawar got eight spring internships. In a blog post detailing what worked for him, prefacing that he can’t prove that any of it did work, he offers some interesting insights for prospective spring interns.
Anawar first bit of advice is not to live and die by the obvious choices. “There’s more to life than just IBD,” Anawar says, and that the best thing to do would be to research and pick “what you are most interested in.”
Some of the advice is well-known. Work experience in finance helps, especially with big firms. If you're a UK student, you should have an AAB at A-Level at a minimum (“If you have lower grades, look into corporate banking,” Anawar said); and you should note the specific results of your experiences, rather than just give generic descriptions.
Anawar also has some more niche tips. For example, he says you should always wear a suit and tie when doing a pre-recorded HireVue interview. He says you should smile, be “giddy” and likeable.
In fact, a big focus of Anawar’s advice concerns likeability. In a live interview, “you don't want them walking away just neutral on you,” and that means reading your interviewer. “Adjust if they seem engaged or if they've checked out,” he said. Even during an assessment centre, dealing with people who “say dumb stuff sometimes” means disagreeing “without being annoying about it.”
And, of course, being likeable is a project that stretches into your very hobbies. Don’t just say you’re a football fan, say that you’re a “loyal Arsenal” fan (other teams presumably are okay to note here). “Boxing, go-karting, content creation” is “way more interesting.” Anawar says.
Of course, if you don’t get a spring week, it’s not the end of the world. You can still get a second year summer internship the normal way, but expect it to be an uphill battle: Trackr noted last year that a sizeable chunk of spring weeks were not convertible into a summer internship. This year, even less are.
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