- A Goldman Sachs internship can be a golden ticket, but getting a job offer isn’t guaranteed.
- Partner Dave Friedland debunks the myth of limited spots and shares the secrets to success.
- Intern India Stephenson says attitude can be more important than financial modeling.
While many college students take internships to pad their resumes and earn pocket money, those spending their summer on Wall Street tend to have their eyes on the ultimate prize: a full-time job offer.
A big draw of an investment banking internship is that it can be a one-way ticket to secure a job that rakes in a $100,000 base salary before you even begin senior year. Students are thus highly motivated to prove their worth.
The name of the game, according to popular belief, is to outwork peers — by being the “first in, last out” of the office, asking for extra assignments, and showing your face at every social event. There was talk that that could be even more true because, as Insider previously reported, some students were fearful that competition for return offers would be tougher this year amid a drought in dealmaking and industry-wide layoffs.
But, at least at Goldman Sachs, it’s not a knockout ring. A partner at the firm, which is one of the most prestigious and exclusive financial institutions on Wall Street, told Insider that the bank has space for every intern entering their senior year of college to become a full-time employee after graduation. This suggests that if you don’t get an offer, it’s on you (not the macro environment).
The fates of this summer’s interns are already sealed. The bank’s nine-week summer program, including one week of training, started on June 6 and ends today. This summer Goldman hosted 2,970 interns, about 500 of whom were placed in the investment bank, according to stats provided by Goldman. This 2023 class — placed in more than 50 Goldman offices across the world — represented more than 500 universities, 83 languages, and 99 nationalities, according to the firm.
In an effort to help future wannabe bankers succeed, Insider spoke to the Goldman partner and a current intern to get a full range of tips on how to excel at the bank and snag a return offer.
The partner, Dave Friedland, is head of the Americas Cross Markets Group, which hosted 24 interns this summer. The intern, India Stephenson, has been working with the consumer retail group.
They advised future Goldman interns to learn how to multitask and have a solutions-oriented mindset, among other suggestions. They also said interns should be comfortable with failure. Many of their insights are applicable to finance internships across the street.
The job offer is yours to lose.
Goldman’s summer programs are particularly competitive — the acceptance rates for internships across the firm and those specifically in investment banking are about 1.5%, according to a person familiar with the program.
Friedland, who has been at Goldman for 25 years, started out as an intern himself in 1997. Now, he’s a member of the Investment Banking Executive Committee and actively involved in the firm’s recruiting efforts at Columbia University and the University of Michigan. He helps decide which interns in his group, which focuses on mid-market corporate and financial sponsor clients, get invited back for full-time jobs.
Friedland debunked the myth that the bank pits interns against each other to fill limited spots for full-time roles.
“The honest truth is, we’ve got capacity for everybody,” he said. “We don’t come in and say, okay there’s 24 of you, there’s room for 15, and draw a hard line. People don’t think it’s true, but it is true.”
“Now, at the end of the summer, not everybody gets an offer,” Friedland conceded. “But that’s not a headcount game or a competition that gets set up between people. The people who don’t get offers, honestly, most of the time, it’s because at some point during the summer, the person decided this wasn’t for them or we’ve collectively figured out with the person, this isn’t for you.”
A lot of the pressure and competitiveness is born out of the interactions among the students themselves, he said.
“I always say to them: A huge portion of the pressure in this job comes from your peers. There’s enough of it that comes from above, don’t do that to each other. There’s room for all of you. You’re all not going to want it. So that’s okay. Use the summer to figure out if you do want it, and don’t add to the pressure by putting it onto your friends and colleagues. It’s just not worth it.”
The gig is more than math.
There’s a stereotype that Wall Street analysts spend their days hunched over a computer perfecting financial models or knee-deep in a spreadsheet. But Friedland said, at this level, the job is not really about math or technical skills at all.
“Everybody comes into these banking and finance jobs thinking it’s all about Excel, it’s all about finance and modeling. It’s really not. The qualitative things we ask people to do are just as important as the quantitative,” he said. “The truth is, we can teach everybody the math. There are some things that you can’t teach people.”
More important, he said, is how you interact with others and how you approach the tasks at hand.
“You have to ask smart questions. You have to be positive and enthusiastic. You have to be willing to try and actually be comfortable failing, because you are going to make mistakes in this job, by definition,” said Friedland. “When we sit down at the end of the summer, do we evaluate people on technical skills? Yes. But everybody comes from a different background. We don’t just hire finance majors, and so we evaluate people on, are they good team players? Do they have good communication skills? Were they proactive and responsive? Are they hard workers?”
India Stephenson — a rising senior at Princeton University — agreed.
“Once you get here, the skills that I think separate interns are really attitude, enthusiasm, and being a team player; showing up every day willing to work with a smile on your face,” Stephenson told Insider.
As a politics major, Stephenson admitted feeling nervous about her lack of technical finance experience. Her classes are more about analysis and critical thinking than memorizing technical skills and learning formulas.
But after interning on Goldman’s derivatives team last summer when she was a rising junior, she was invited back to intern again this year, this time in the consumer retail group.
“It’s an apprenticeship culture, so they want to teach you,” she said. “They don’t expect you to know everything when you get here, so to be successful, you just need to be super willing to engage with that.”
Find solutions, not problems.
When you’re on a project, try to approach it with a solutions-oriented mindset, said Friedland.
“You go into someone’s office, you don’t sit there and say, ‘I don’t know how to do this,'” he said. “You go into somebody’s office and you say, ‘I’ve never done this before, here’s what I was thinking, is that the right way to approach it or would you give me another suggestion?'”
Friedland also suggests interns should take ownership of their work, even assigned tasks where it can be easy to just go through the motions.
“Try to really understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Don’t just put the numbers in the Excel or put the bullet points on the PowerPoint,” he said. “If you actually take the extra time to understand it, when you get asked to do something that’s similar, it’s just easier. You can’t memorize this stuff. You have to actually learn it.”
That means owning your mistakes, too, he said. He gave as an example interns who miscalculated how long it would take to finish a task.
“The mistake they make is then they don’t go back to the person and say, ‘I thought I could get this done in an hour. It’s been an hour and a half. When do you actually want it? Do you need it tonight or is tomorrow okay?’ Most of the time the person says tomorrow is okay.”
Be a multitasker.
Friedland says being a multitasker is probably the most important skill to have in this role. That’s because the job “isn’t linear,” he said. You don’t work on one project at a time, finish it, then move onto the next one.
“You need to be nimble and flexible because you can work on four or five different things at the same time for four or five different people. That’s really hard. That’s a real skill,” he said.
“When I sit with the interns, I try to give them analogies to things. Are you the person that when finals come up, you study for one final and then you take it, study for the next final and take it, and so on? Or are you the person who can have six final exams in two days and study bits and pieces of each one so that when you’re ready, you can take all of them?”
The latter is what life as a banker is like, he said. It’s a skill interns will have to develop, if they don’t have it already, because they do real-world work, Friedland added.
“When they come here for the summer, they’re working on real clients, on real projects, and their role on the team is a real role. We don’t make up work for people to do, to keep them busy. We don’t have somebody sit next to somebody and shadow and observe them.”
That includes financial analysis and editing documents that clients will see.
“They help make pitch books or client presentations or offering memorandums, if we’re selling a company, or IPO documents,” he said. “They’re producing and helping to produce a lot of that.”
Admit what you don’t know.
As selective as the application process is, Goldman summer analysts are not expected to know how to do their jobs before they start. The failure to acknowledge that you don’t know it all is a big mistake, Friedland said.
“I think sometimes when people don’t know how to do something, they sit for too long spinning their wheels and trying to figure it out because they want to prove that they can do it, or that they know how to do it,” he said. “It’s a mistake because they’re not getting the stuff done on time. Or they’re not getting exposure to as many things as they could get exposure to because they’re spending too much time on one thing.”
The real skill isn’t knowing the answer to things, he said, but rather knowing where to go to get the answer. It’s one reason Goldman sets every intern up with a “buddy” — usually a full-time second or first-year analyst who’s tasked with helping interns with everyday questions and conundrums. When Stephenson was feeling nervous ahead of hitting the desk, for example, she was candid with her buddy.
“She and I talked the week before I started and I was so honest,” said Stephenson. “I said, I’m really nervous, I don’t know how to model. And she said, don’t even worry about it, I’m going to teach you everything you need to know.”
Successful interns “figure out what the questions are and then figure out who to go ask for help,” Friedland added. “This isn’t like a test where you’re supposed to get an A on the test and you’re not supposed to ask your friend who sits next to you. Ask your buddy or mentor, ask the person who gave you the test.”
Are you a banker at a Wall Street firm? Contact this reporter to share your experience. Emmalyse Brownstein can be reached via email at [email protected], or the encrypted app Signal at (305) 857-5516.
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