- Goldman Sachs’ summer internship program is harder to get into than Harvard.
- We spoke to a Goldman intern and partner about what the summer gig entails.
- They walked us through an average day, from the morning check-in to the financial modeling.
As India Stephenson prepared for her first day as an intern at Goldman Sachs this summer, she did what many college students might to assuage their nerves.
She called her mom.
“I said, ‘I’m so nervous. I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to do this,'” Stephenson told Insider about the conversation that took place the night before she began a nine-week stint working for Goldman’s esteemed investment bank.
India, a rising senior at Princeton and a member of the university’s squash team, isn’t new to prestigious environments or competitive tasks. But as a politics major, she’d spent her college career writing essays, not formatting financial models.
“I would be lying if I say I wasn’t intimidated. I was completely intimidated,” she told Insider. “I think it’s just par for the course when you try something new.”
Stephenson wrapped up her Goldman internship with the consumer retail team last week and got an offer to return to the bank full-time after graduation, which she’s accepted. She says she is amazed at how far she has come since those early days, although her mom is less surprised.
“I was just talking to her yesterday and she was laughing — listening to me over the course of the summer, how much I’ve learned and how much more confident I feel eight weeks in,” Stephenson said of her mother.
Starting a new job is always scary, especially for people just starting out their careers. This is especially true for students interested in investment banking, where there tends to be more at stake than a good reference letter. Investment banking internships are often tests for full-time job offers. Students who do well are asked to return after graduation to work as investment banking analysts, a job that comes with a salary of over $100,000. It’s just one reason these summer programs are so competitive.
In an effort to shed light on what the internship is like for future Goldman Sachs interns and intern applicants, we take readers inside the experience. In an interview with Insider, Stephenson described her life as a summer analyst at the firm, from the podcasts she listened to on her morning commute to the type of work she did in her group and her favorite place to grab lunch near Goldman’s 200 West Street headquarters.
We also spoke with Goldman partner Dave Friedland, who has been at the firm for about 25 years and 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 shared his perspective on what a summer interning at Goldman is like, how it differs from when he started out decades ago, and his advice on how to leave with a full-time role.
Inside the internship program
Goldman’s summer programs are particularly competitive — the acceptance rates for internships across the firm are about 1.5%, including for investment banking, according to a person familiar with the program. Harvard’s acceptance rate, by comparison, is 3.4%.
The investment bank’s summer analysts usually spend one week in training, and eight weeks on the job. This summer Goldman hosted 2,970 interns, about 500 of whom were placed in the investment bank, according to stats provided by Goldman. The 2023 class represented more than 500 universities, 83 languages, and 99 nationalities, according to the firm. They were placed in more than 50 Goldman offices around the world.
Most summer analysts participate just before their senior year of college with the hope that they’ll get an offer at the end of the summer to return as a full-time analyst after graduation. The application process for the internship starts more than a year in advance, with interviews taking place when most candidates are closing out their sophomore years.
Some rising juniors are also part of the internship classes, however, including Stephenson, who applied for her first Goldman internship during her freshman year of college.
Last summer, she interned on the derivatives team within the investment bank, a group that deals with corporate clients’ exposure to things like foreign exchange and interest rates.
“It was a hectic time as it still is now, but I loved it. I think for me, especially being a politics major, being close to the market and sort of learning there, my first sort of introduction to financial services, I really enjoyed it.”
This summer, she was invited back, this time on the consumer retail group, which advises major food, beverage, and fashion companies.
“It’s a lot of the names that I knew or have engaged with as a consumer, which is really interesting,” said Stephenson. “These companies have complex problems and questions that they need answered or solved.”
A day in the life of a Goldman intern
While Goldman’s headquarters are in Manhattan, the firm has offices all over the world. Where an intern ends up is often determined by the team they are placed with. For example, an internship in the tech, media, and telecom (TMT) group of the investment bank might take place in San Francisco. Both summers, India has been in New York City.
Last summer, Stephenson took the subway to work, which had its share of problems. This year she got an apartment located about 15 minutes walking distance from the office. That allowed her to start her days by tuning into one of her favorite podcasts on the walk to work each morning.
“I love my walk to work. I put my AirPods in, listen to a podcast, grab my Starbucks on the way,” she told Insider during her last week of the internship. “I took the subway last summer. I did go the wrong way a couple of times, so I’m lucky to sort of be rid of that.”
Her go-to podcasts included “The Toast,” a comedic pop culture podcast, or “All-In,” an economy-focused show. Stephenson would settle at her desk — next to two associates — by about 9:30 a.m. Her first task of the day, she said, was to check in with the full-time analysts she was working under.
“I’ll check in with my analysts on each team, sort of touch base on where we’re at, what we need to be doing on our various projects, which are all at different stages. And then my day progresses from there based on what projects I’m working on. And it really varies, which is fun.”
Stephenson said she and other interns were fans of Pick A Bagel in the nearby Conrad Hotel for a good breakfast. For lunch, she frequented the food court at Brookfield Place, a shopping center near the office. Her favorite place there was Naya, a Middle Eastern fast-casual restaurant, which she visited “almost every day.”
“It’s sort of a perfect quick run across the street. I get some sunshine and sit outside for a little bit,” she said.
Investment bankers are notorious for working long hours, including at Goldman Sachs. But Stephenson said that for her, every day was different.
“I could leave at 6:00 p.m. for a group-sponsored event, it could be 8 after dinner, it could be later. It always varies, so never a specific time.”
There was plenty of time to socialize outside of the office, she said, which helped make her class a tight-knit group.
“We’ve all become good friends this summer, and so whenever we can grab dinner or spend a couple hours outside of work together, we totally do,” she said. “It’s really fun that we’re all in the city together and exploring. We definitely have time to hang outside of work, which is great getting to know each other.”
Interns do ‘real work’
At some companies, the interns do fake work. Not at Goldman Sachs.
According to Friedland, there’s no “busy work” or “shadowing” and the senior bankers rely on the interns to do real work.
“People, 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, ” said Friedland, who has been at Goldman for about 25 years. “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.”
One reason, Friedland said, is because in summertime there are gaps to fill.
“One, that’s how people figure it out. That’s how we figure out if they’re good at it. But two, we need them. Our structure is such that when the summer comes around, we have full-time people who have left because they’re moving on to whatever they do next. So there’s real stuff and that was always true.”
Stephenson agreed and said doing work with real impact is both rewarding and intense.
“You’re very much involved as an intern. You’re not doing busy work or running around doing things that aren’t important. You’re really integrated in these teams and you’re a real value-add,” Stephenson said. “Especially here, the work that we do has real ramifications for really important companies. It’s intense, it’s very rewarding, and it’s really interesting work.”
What does that work actually look like? In general, interns across the investment bank may find themselves doing similar types of tasks, albeit for different clients, depending on their group. Common tasks include making a presentation consistent and neat for a client meeting; taking notes on a client call; or editing a financial model. Stephenson said she saw a “plethora of deals at various different stages” over this past summer.
“It’s a lot of PowerPoint and Excel,” said Stephenson. “I definitely take a lot of notes so that I can be value-add and help out my analyst who might be doing something else.”
Added Friedland, “They do a lot of financial analysis. They help make pitch books or client presentations or offering memorandums, if we’re selling a company, or IPO documents. They’re producing and helping to produce a lot of that.”
Because the interns are doing real work, it’s vital that they learn to multitask, Friedland said. This is so important that it can make or break their chances at a full-time offer, as Insider has previously reported.
“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.
It’s a buddy system
For Stephenson, even in her second internship at the firm, the learning curve was steep. But her lack of experience as a non-finance major wasn’t a hindrance to her success.
“It’s an apprenticeship culture, so they want to teach you. They don’t expect you to know everything when you get here,” she said. “To be successful, you just need to be super willing to engage with that. And you get what you put in. If you put in that enthusiasm, put in that hard work and show that you’re really a curious thinker, you will get rewarded and you’ll have an amazing experience.”
Stephenson suggests that future interns lean on Goldman’s “buddy” system, as she did. The firm sets up each intern with a “buddy” — usually a first- or second-year analyst who helps 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.”
Stephenson added that it’s also important to seek mentors outside of the buddy system. She, for example, kept in touch with her boss from last summer on the derivatives team, a Princeton alumni.
“To have someone who’s in your corner and you feel like has your best interest at heart, I think, is really lucky,” she said. “It’s a common thing here to have really strong mentors. I’m super lucky that I’ve found a couple.”
The job is harder than it used to be
Friedland interned at Goldman in the late 90s while getting his MBA at Columbia. Back then, the internship was 12 weeks long.
With the rise of the internet and social media, the stakes for serving clients are higher, he said.
“When I first started, just gathering information and summarizing and presenting the information for clients was value-add. Now clients have access to all the information they need, basic stuff, kind of everywhere. Just sharing information isn’t valuable anymore. And so it’s become harder to add value.”
On the plus side, work is a lot more flexible than it was even five years ago, he said
“The technology did not exist to work from home. And I don’t mean work from home where you don’t go to the office five days in a row. I mean, you wake up on a Sunday, you’ve got two hours of stuff to do before you go do something fun, and you just want to knock it out. When I was an intern, you had to get on the subway and go to the office because you had to sit in front of your computer to do it. Because you couldn’t do it from home. And so I think when you’ve got a little bit of work to do, the flexibility to do it from wherever you are is so much greater now than it was before.”
Nobody is watching you
Friedland wants interns to know that sitting at the desk late into the night doesn’t really help you.
To be sure, if your entire team is grinding to finish a presentation for a client meeting the next day, you should probably stick around until the job is done. But staying late just for the look of it might not get you very far because the senior bankers who make the hiring decisions don’t have time to keep track of everything the interns do.
“Nobody’s watching you,” Friedland said. “I mean, the truth is, senior people are traveling all the time to clients. Nobody’s sitting here keeping track of how long they’re here. We keep track of whether they got their work done.”
One big reason behind the culture of “face time” stems from the premise that firms have limited full-time spots to offer the analysts (especially in a down year). But, at least at Goldman, Friedland said that’s not the case.
“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.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone gets an offer. (Insider outlined Friedland and Stephenson’s advice for how to snag a return offer here.) But hopefully that knowledge will pave the way for more interns to enjoy their experience, he said.
“People often say things like, ‘culture comes from the top,’ but it also comes the other way too,” he said. “If you’ve got a group of juniors who are really excited and enthused, it just changes the dynamic for the group and it just makes everybody happier. So for me, even though I’m a partner, even though I’ve been here a long time, I actually spend a lot of time on our summer intern program. More than people might think from the outside.”
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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