The Chinese summer internship season is almost upon us. While investment banks don’t recruit students in the same numbers in Beijing and Shanghai as they do in New York and London, the quality of their intakes remains high.
A few public profiles of China-based ‘incoming interns’ have started to appear online.
If you’re wondering why you didn’t get selected for an internship yourself (or if you want to know who you’ll be up against this summer), here’s a selection of 2016 interns to inspire you.
Zhening Ke
Investment banks in China love extracurricular activities as much as they do in other markets – and Ke, who’s about to intern at Morgan Stanley, comes with a host of them. For starters, she’s ‘secretary general’ of the student union at the School of Economics at Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University. She’s also vice president of the Youth Volunteers Association, a member of the Future Bankers and Consultants Club, and she even helps to teach primary school students every week.
Shunjie Sun
This incoming Bank of America Merrill Lynch summer analyst has an impressive academic record, even by the standards of IBD interns. He’s currently topping off his Peking University Bachelor’s degree with a Master of Finance from Tsinghua University. He’s also been a visiting student at three overseas colleges – Stanford, Sciences Po, and Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München – and has won 10 scholarships since 2011, including one (the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship) worth about $7.2k.
Yuning Wu
Wu is studying at Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, one of the top feeder schools for Chinese investment bankers. His local and global investment banking background would have also been crucial to him getting a job at Citi this summer. In 2015 Wu spent three months at Goldman Sachs, one month at Deutsche Bank and three at Haitong Securities.
Shuopeng Gu
Do you need to have racked up several previous investment banking internships to get a job at Goldman Sachs in China? Not necessarily. Gu got the role partly on the strength of his consultancy experience. He’s done internships at both Bain & Company and McKinsey & Company, and during his time at Bain he ranked sixth out of 378 participants in the firm’s case competition for China.
Leqi Ji
Chinese investment banks are increasingly looking to hire interns who have experience with global firms on their CVs. Last year Ji, an incoming intern at CICC Securities, was part of the winning team of the ‘10,000 Women China Student Competition’ at Goldman Sachs and was a part-time assistant at Boston Consulting Group. She’s also been an assurance intern at PwC. Like many interns in China she’s combined a degree at an elite local university (Tsinghua) with an overseas exchange (to the College of Business at the University of Illinois).
Zihao Liu
How many times can you intern at one bank in China? Liu started out at CICC in Beijing as a ‘summer camp trainee’ in 2014. By last year he’d moved on to become a sales and trading summer analyst with the firm, and this year he’s a fixed income intern. Liu is also active outside of the classroom at the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University where he’s a member of the Hedge Fund Association, Youth League Committee and Student Union.
Yipei Jiang
Chinese technology companies are increasingly hiring investment bankers – and Jiang has already clocked up both tech and banking experience on his CV even before he’s graduated. The incoming Morgan Stanley intern spent last summer at internet search giant Baidu and the previous one at CITIC Securities.
Related articles:
Citi’s Singapore CEO explains how to get a graduate job at the bankWhat does it take to get a graduate job or internship at Citi? We turned to Han Kwee Juan, chief executive officer of Citibank Singapore, for advice.
It’s tough to get a job at Goldman Sachs if you graduated from a Hong Kong universityGoldman Sachs is not among the banks in Hong Kong that have the most employees with degrees from local universities.
One in three Goldman Sachs staff in Singapore went to a local universityDo you need to spend thousands studying overseas to get a job at Goldman Sachs in Singapore?
Image credit: JinHui1988, iStock, Thinkstock