Summer Internship

Finance internships don't happen until summer junior year, although you're applying for them in fall based on your sophomore spring/summer GPA. Your best bet might be to tag on as a teller at a bank or with some financial advisor to learn sales skills (assuming they'll take you as a junior). You could also look at non-business, non-finance internships over sophomore summer: like a political or international studies internship with Center for Strategic and International Studies or some other Washington think tank.

Although the very best advice might be to just take Intermediate Accounting I and II and Tax Accounting, and your Finance core, and just get all A's in all of them. And, of course, everything else.

You need to be open to jobs at Accounting and Energy firms, as non-sales finance: ie, investment banking, management consulting or fund/asset management, is kind of a pipe dream outside of NYC and without and MBA and/or Ivy undergrad.

 

Pouhe is right, those are Jr year stuff.

Work at Chase for a while or BoA if you want to learn how to scam ppl out of billions.

 

I posted this a while back. Just based on my failures as a 2.4 Finance undergrad trying to get opportunities at U of H (and thereafter).

 

I didn't get a finance internship till my senior year (then again I didn't really try before that either...) and it was terrible juggling that and school at the same time

So yea, I don't know, best of luck to you......hope you get a job in the summer and not have to go through the crap I did

 

...And part two:

 

I wouldn't worry too much about getting a finance internship the summer before your junior year. Just get any internship that'll look good on a resume and get you some connections, preferably one that pays. Some companies offer summer leadership programs for college sophomores, maybe look into one of those. Just show that you're a go-getter and as long as your grades are good you should be okay for next year.

 

Oh yeah, ignore the Stanford Financial stuff in my first big post. Tee-hee.

 

if you happen to be a minority scholar (please, don't take this to D&D), there is an organization that specializes in networking for rising soph/juniors/seniors and helping them get internships. there's additional time commitments, though, but it's how i got my tech consulting internship as a sophomore at a Big 4 firm. perhaps they have contacts for financial industry.

http://www.inroads.org/students/are-you-ready-inroads

 

Can attest to a classmate getting a Wells Fargo internship from them and now being a VP. Not sure if SEO is related, but my younger brother got a Prudential Securities internship through them (although he was undergrad Yale) and just left an eight-year stint in Fixed Income/MBS Repo at Lehman/Barclay's.

 

Only job I got through campus recruiting was retail management at Walgreens. But again, no real accounting hours, no networking/extracurrics.

Got a gas scheduling job at Enron subsidiary pipeline through monster.com. Gas scheduling is considered a training job for a gas trader: as schedulers at gas marketing companies structure and schedule transport for physical gas deals and work directly under gas traders. However, gas schedulers at interstate pipelines (which I was) just confirm the transport and don't do anything related to actual gas trading. So with a finance degree and eight years of pipeline gas scheduling I haven't been able to get any kind of gas trading job: not even settlements or trade confirmations.

Currently I'm a budget analyst for the operations side of the same pipeline, but it's all just invoice approval for the field personnel and retrieving/formatting some financial reports for the ops managers. Never been able to get an entry-level lending or banking job either. An MBA, CFA or even CMA might change that, but grades too poor to get a non-online MBA and opting to just get a second bachelors part-time (engineering) instead of a CFA.

Good grades (>3.50 or 3.75), accounting hours beyond Intermediate I and II, and some kind of leadership or networking activities (student groups, charities, fraternity).

 

Great info Pouche. I'm also a finance major, specializing in Investment Management. For the first part of the summer I'm doing some summer school because I'm behind (Due to a sickness i got first semester sophomore year). The second half, I got a small internship. It may not be the best but it's an internship which I can put on my resume.

I'm just trying to decide if I want to go straight on to Graduate school after I graduate next may.

 

Except Asians.

 

I would have done JD+MBA, MS Finance (CFA Prep) or MS Acctg (for CPA if no Bachelors in Acctg) if I was right out of undergrad and still had no debt.

 

Negative.

I am proof. One of 3 filipinos in my INROADS "class."

 

Kramerica is looking for interns.

 

I'm an accounting major with a GPA of 3.2ish and work as a teller. I've actually been looking for a reason to quit my job at the bank because after almost 3 years there I'm pretty much tired of it. So from what I've gathered in this thread is to just stay where I'm at until I graduate?

 

Your GPA seems good enough for a corporate internship at an energy company or other non-finance corporation, but even getting an on-campus interview could be tough at an I-bank. If your accounting grades are good you should definitely put in for any and all Big Four (?) accounting internships that come along. You should also consider working at the Houston branch of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank or even as an auditor for the FDIC.

I assume there are some Personal Banker, Loan Processor or Branch Management programs you could put in for now; and you should be in the driver's seat for a Credit Analyst or Corporate Development position after you graduate. That may not seem very prestigious but I've actually never been able to get any of those positions, so you should definitely make the most of that experience.