It’s not easy getting into an investment bank. – Morgan Stanley receives “something like 92,000 résumés from kids” (a year) according to CEO James Gorman. Goldman Sachs receives tens of thousands of applicants for intern places alone. If you applied for a top banking internship and you didn’t get a place, it’s therefore because competition is very, very tough. And because the people who do get offers are usually outstanding.
So who will be turning up at the world’s top investment banks when summer internships start in a few weeks’ time? Here’s a sample of what banks’ existing staff have to look forward to.
Isaias Ortega will be interning in Goldman’s securities division
Isaias Ortega, an electronics and engineering student at Imperial College London, is going to be interning in Goldman’s securities division. Ortega was a spring intern at Goldman Sachs in 2015. He speaks Spanish, English. German and French and has ten GCSEs, six of which are at A* and four of which are graded A.
Kaelan Ong will be interning in Morgan Stanley’s investment banking division
Kaelan Ong, an economics student at the London School of Economics (LSE) will soon be arriving in IBD at Morgan Stanley. Ong has four A*s in maths, further maths, economics and physics. He got ‘1st class’ marks for every unit of his first year exams at the LSE. He’s been a spring intern at Morgan Stanley, Barclays and Credit Suisse. He’s a member of all sorts of LSE societies (emerging markets forum, leadership forum, debating society) and he’s an analyst for ‘Global Platinum Securities’, the LSE’s own $200k student investment fund.
Tommaso Perticucci will be interning in J.P. Morgan’s investment banking division
Tommaso Perticucci, a student at Cass Business School, is among the incoming IBD interns at J.P. Morgan. Cass is less prestigious than the LSE and Imperial, but Perticucci hasn’t let that hinder him. He’s already been a spring intern at Bank of America and HSBC. He’s already attended a ‘Future Leaders Seminar’ at Goldman Sachs. And he’s sat the Bloomberg Aptitude Test and scored in the 98th percentile worldwide.
Joe Zhou will be interning in Goldman Sachs’ operations division
Joe Zhou is studying finance and investment banking at the ICMA Centre at the University of Reading. Next year he’ll be studying a Masters in Finance at Imperial College London. And during his summer holiday, he’ll be interning in Goldman Sachs’ operations division.
Operations is theoretically easier to get into than investment banking or sales and trading, but Zhou suggests the bar is still pretty high. He’s already been a summer analyst at Shenwan & Hongyuan Securities in Shanghai. He’s also been a summer associate at Markit in London. And he’s president of the Reading University Finance Society.
Niccolò Consonni will be interning in Credit Suisse’s investment banking division
Investment banks in London like to hire from Bocconi in Italy. Niccolò Consonni is studying International Finance at Bocconi and will be joining Credit Suisse’s investment banking division in a few weeks’ time.
Consonni has laid the groundwork for his summer role. – He’s already been a spring analyst at Citi and Credit Suisse and has been a ‘visitor’ at Morgan Stanley. He’s begun learning how to use Bloomberg (and has a certificate in ‘Bloomberg Essentials’) and in summer 2012 he participated in an ‘Innovation and Creativity Camp’ at Citi in Milan.