Head Scratchers

Have People Really Lost Faith in the Wall St. Internship?

You may have noticed a piece in the Dealbook this week about the woes of a summer internship on Wall Street. It reiterated a lot of things we already knew: that college interns at Goldman Sachs sometimes work 85 hours a week, that Deutsche Bank kids stay there until 3 a.m. and that, yes, the perks are now fewer and farther between.

But the piece also raised some critical (and, perhaps, woefully unexamined) issues: are Wall Street interns treated unfairly – and does their work really pay off?

Mogulite got the scoop from one former Wall Street intern, who (on the condition of anonymity) told us that while internships are often a prerequisite for a finance career, they’re not a guarantee of a post-grad dream job.

“Wall Street firms [tend] to go with the ‘safe’ hire, generally the kid from the higher-ranked school with the higher GPA and the more ‘traditional’ series of internships,” our source explained. “Your goal was to follow that mold as close as possible.”

Of course, this former intern noted that the economic environment today is tougher on the college kid trying to make it in finance.

“I’d imagine now that the job market is even tighter, people are trying to go nuts and thus taking on anything and everything they can weasel themselves into, all for perhaps naught,” this individual noted.

Of course this is just one opinion – but the Dealbook story may be representative of a growing consensus. It was just last month that one investment banking intern (based on the west coast) became infamous for writing a tell-all blog on the life of an aspiring finance mogul:

We do enormous amounts of work, efficiently, and in not so enormous amounts of time. … We work ourselves to within an inch of our sanity because somewhere out there, in the distance, we see a faint and distant picture of our desired future. A future filled with summer homes in the Hampton’s [sic], private jets, and model trophy wives, all by the age of thirty five.

Gross clichés aside, this sounds rather brutal.

So has the tide turned against the institution of the Wall Street internship? Well, to put it mildly, we doubt Goldman Sachs will have trouble attracting young college kids anytime soon.

TAGS: deutsche bank internships | goldman sachs internships | summer finance interns | wall street internships

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