Home Stretch

With less than a week and a half left in my internship, I feel that it is really crunch time.  There’s a few projects that I want to put finishing touches on at work, I want to make sure to thank the different people I’ve talked to this summer, I need to prepare my end of summer presentation, and I have a job interview on the last day of work.  My past couple of weeks have been geared towards this end of summer dismount.

After many career path considerations and very little decisiveness, I decided I should get some more experience in finance this summer.  I joined a class at a place called the Investment Banking Institute.  I’ll admit that it sounds shady, but my sister and another mutual friend of ours took the same class and they both highly recommended it.  I figured that the class would be a good way to explore the investment banking industry and gain a little knowledge in case I pursue an IB job.  It has been an even better experience than I thought.  With a physics and engineering background I’m often lost in the class when large terms that I’ve never heard of are used, but I find that the modeling we have been doing comes relatively easily and learning the concepts is pretty fun.

The end of summer presentation that I'm doing at Citi is another item that deserves a good amount of attention from me.  I don’t really feel that the bar is set very high for us, but my performance will directly reflect on my managers.  My managers and their bosses will be there, so I need to at least make them look good.  I’ve been working to come up with a good presentation that will ideally stand out from the crowd.

The real finale of my 10 weeks is going to be the interview I landed.  I reached out to a Citi executive who gave us interns a talk one day, he connected me to a line of human resource people, and I received an offer to interview at a super day for investment banking at Citi on August 10 - the last day of the internship.  I will now interject with some (pretty obvious) wisdom: If you ever want to ask somebody a question, it cannot hurt to ask.  No matter who they are and whether or not you think they will respond, if you make sure not to be blatantly rude the worst that will happen is that they ignore your email.  The guy I emailed is the CEO of Securities and Banking at Citi, a HUGE position.  Despite his standing, he still connected me and ended up hooking me up with a great opportunity.

The internship is basically over, but I need to finish strong.  The presentation and the interview are going to be huge focus points, but leaving a lasting impression on the various people I’ve interacted with this summer is also a priority of mine.