How to Ace your Virtual Internship
Congratulations on securing a summer internship, to get to this stage takes a lot of time, dedication and persistence. We appreciate that many incoming interns will be asked to work from home as part of a virtual internship programme, which is why we have set out the best ways to succeed in this setup and in ultimately converting to a full-time analyst position.
Photo Credit: Bloomberg.com
Getting ready for your Internship
There are a number of things you can do to prepare for your incoming internship. This applies for all areas of the financial industry; including investment banking, corporate banking, management consulting, actuarial services, accounting, investment management, wealth management, private equity or hedge funds. Firstly, get to grips with your employer - their history, client base, geography coverage, previous landmark deals and top management. It is important to have some perspective on your workplace; the scale at which they operate, their company growth and, most importantly, the culture at the firm. Look at internal documents, annual reports, news stories from reliable sources such as the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg in addition to other sources such as financial community websites.
Next, try to get a better idea of what you will be doing over the next six to ten weeks. A good start would be to review the role description when you first applied, but we would recommend to get in touch directly with either the programme coordinators or junior analysts at the firm. In doing so, you may be able to gauge expectations of future workload and proficiency in financial analysis and modelling, basic economics and industry knowledge. We thoroughly recommend all online courses run by Financial Edge Training that cover most areas within the financial industry, ranging from investment banking and project finance to asset management and sales & trading. To help you get prepared, we have partnered with Financial Edge Training to offer a 25% off all their online courses using the code FCLIMB25.
Create your perfect working setup
To ensure that you are best set up to succeed in working from home, the first step is to find a dedicated office space. In an ideal world, having a room to yourself at home will help you to focus on work with limited distractions from others around you. Invest in one or two monitors and a display port cable that can easily connect your work laptop to the monitor(s). A wireless headset also goes a long way when teleconferencing, increasing sound quality and in ensuring that no one else can listen to these calls.
