THE CAMPUS CHRONICLER: Be warned - not all investment banking internships are equal

In my experience, the investment banking graduate recruitment market is polarising: at one pole there are the people who desperately want an internship and can't get one. At the other, there are the people who have so many internship offers they don't know which one to accept.

If you fall into the latter category, make your choice carefully. It will be tempting to select an internship based on the league table position and prestige of the bank concerned. Don't.

What you really need to be thinking about are your chances of getting a graduate offer. And this is particularly dependent upon the type of internship you do.

Desk based or rotational?

In general, I'd say the best kinds of internship are rotational ones.

Why? They give candidates the best chance of getting a job and are very meritocratic.

The problem with desk based internships is that, as the name suggests, they are based on one single desk. If you get a job offer, it will have to be from that desk. Sometimes, that desk has no vacancies.

Last summer, for example, a friend of mine interned at one of the top European banks in London. He was on a desk-specific internship in equities. At the end of the summer, that desk informed him that although they thought he was extremely impressive and wanted to offer him a graduate job, they simply didn't have the headcount to do so.

This scenario was repeated for other friends of mine at other banks with desk-based internships. Everywhere, they ended up competing against each other for a small pool of graduate jobs. Most of them are still without a firm position.

By comparison, with rotational internships, interns have much more scope for networking. If a candidate does well and is recommended, the chances of getting a graduate offer seem to be higher.

There are advantages of desk-specific internships however. If a candidate already has a clear idea of which asset class they are interested in, it's clearly beneficial for them to learn as much as possible about the particular area which holds their interest.

Equally, not all rotational internships will result in an offer. Goldman Sachs runs a rotational programme but many of my friends who interned in markets at the bank last year were unlucky. They're now being obliged to intern again this summer.

The author is a student at one of the better known universities in the UK.