BACK IN JUNE a bright, young, soon-to-be Deutsche Bank intern prepared for his first summer on Wall Street. He told us he knew what he was getting into:
“Terrible hours.”
He was right.
On this 21-year-old’s very first day, he was staffed on a project at 8 pm and ended up working until 2:30 am.
His hours have let up somewhat since, but he rarely leaves before 10:30 pm or 11:30 pm.
On weekends, if he’s not working and can meet a friend for lunch, he’ll choose a table near an open window because the fresh air is such a welcome treat.
Inside the life of a Wall Street intern
Most interns at investment banks are rising seniors, recruited in their junior year of college for 10-week summer programs. If they succeed, they’re usually offered two-year analyst gigs or full-time jobs at the banks.
The internships are very competitive. They’re seen as an important stepping stone to careers at banks, hedge funds, and private-equity firms.
They’re also typically known for grueling 90- or 100-hour workweeks, filled with busywork assigned on very tight deadlines. It used to be normal for interns to keep sleeping bags under their desks and regularly spend nights at the office.
Then, in August 2013, a sudden death sparked a change.
A London-based Bank of America intern in the midst of a summer internship was found dead in his dorm room. Though the death was attributed to natural causes, it raised questions about young Wall Streeters working excessive hours.
That led to a top-down effort at banks to change the internship experience. Two years later, there are new policies in place — and interns will occasionally say the work isn’t as hard as they thought it might be.
But from the perspective of anyone outside the industry, life for Wall Street’s most junior workers is still pretty insane.
After the Bank of America intern’s death in 2013, Goldman Sachs was the first bank to make a change. It began “protecting” Saturdays for junior bankers, including interns and analysts, forbidding them to be in the building on that day.
Citigroup and Credit Suisse followed suit, while junior bankers at Deutsche Bank were awarded two protected weekends a month. At JPMorgan, they get one protected weekend.
Morgan Stanley doesn’t have set rules that regulate hours for junior bankers. That bank leaves it up to the discretion of individual groups. We understand from interns that some, such as the technology banking team, get weekday curfews, while others, such as mergers and acquisitions, do not.
Bank of America interns and analysts must take four weekend days off a month, and during the week they are not expected to work between midnight and 9 a.m. Similarly, at Goldman, junior bankers are expected to be out of the office weekdays between midnight and 7 a.m.
For more on bank policies, there is a full breakdown here.
Shut up, you only worked 90 hours this week
While we were reporting this story, one Morgan Stanley intern insisted that his peers exaggerated how much work they did.
“They’ll say they worked 110 hours one week, and you’re like, ‘Shut up, you only worked 90.’”
But 90 hours is still almost double the average working week in America, according to a 2014 Gallup poll.
And despite new policies, most interns still feel as if they are expected to follow the FILO (first in, last out) rule. This rule applies even to those in sales and trading, who usually aren’t working on specific projects but rather shadowing traders on the floor.
Interns frequently find ways to work around other polices meant to protect them.
One Citigroup intern said junior bankers and interns were still able to work on Saturdays, as long as they get permission from a managing director or human resources. At other banks, bending the rules is said to be even easier.
But Wall Street intern culture has changed some. Gone, it would seem, are the days of office pranks, which were traditionally aimed at bank rookies.
The fact that a second-year Barclays analyst “left the company” shortly after sending a prank email to incoming interns this summer may be evidence of that.
His satirical email outlining the “Ten Power Commandments” of banking was leaked to the media and, despite rumors of its being an old joke recycled each year, he lost both his position at Barclays and, reportedly, his buy-side job offer for next year.
These interns have options
Avoiding tragedy is only one reason banks are trying to make internships more bearable.
The current class of interns grew up during the financial crisis, not during the heyday of the 1980s or ’90s. They’re not as easily sold on finance as former generations. For many elite students from top universities, other career paths — in tech or startups or even in fashion — are just as attractive.
And within the finance sector, talented young Wall Streeters are starting to see the banks as just one of many options.
A growing number of exceptional young people are finding their way directly to hedge funds and private-equity firms. Many of those students see investment banks such as Goldman Sachs as “a backup plan.”
Some hedge funds, including Steve Cohen’s Point72, have even developed two-year programs for recent grads — similar to the investment-banking programs. Point72′s new academy accepted only 14 of 400 applicants for its first year.
The draws to hedge funds and private-equity firms are obvious: better hours, more rewarding work, and the potential to make many times more money in the long-term.
One hedge fund intern told us she actually got overtime pay if she worked more than 40 hours a week — which she does, but not by too much. She had been working closer to 60 hours a week the summer before, but HR told her to cut her hours down.
When she’s at work, that intern said, she gets to do analytic work, such as building company models. At Wall Street investment banks, on the other hand, a typical project may consist of researching companies and making PowerPoint presentations about them.
Another hedge fund intern told us “a monkey could do the job” of a first- or second-year analyst at an investment bank. And those factors are what led one 19-year-old Wharton student to turn down an offer at Goldman Sachs in favor of interning at a hedge fund instead.
But for now, those students are still the exception. Most young Wall Streeters still begin their careers at banks, which have yet to completely lose their allure.
Back in June, when the Deutsche Bank intern was gearing up for his summer, he told himself, “If I absolutely hate it, I don’t have to go back full-time.”
Now, a few weeks away from wrapping up his internship, he’s eager to find out whether he will get a full-time offer.
If given the chance, he said, he would definitely go back next year.
By Portia Crowe for Business Insider
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