SECRET DIARY OF A MARKETS INTERN: Desperate interns have begun working weekends
Having ended last week with a mountain to climb, I had to come in on Sunday to finish my project. I came in around 3pm, hoping it would only take an hour or so, but ended up staying until gone 9pm because every time I thought it was finished something else went wrong. Interestingly, around 3 or 4 other interns were on the floor – clearly people are upping their games with only a few weeks left!
I got in ridiculously early on Monday, completely exhausted but running on adrenaline. I had until 7:15 to make sure my project was in order. Before the internship I was a complete novice with Excel, so I am pretty proud of what I have put together, a regression analysis project looking into a trade idea. At the end of the morning meeting I presented it to the desk, I had made a summary and printed it out, putting my name in bold at the top on the recommendation of one of the sales guys. It went better than I expected, and I felt proud of what I’d done.
Later on in the day one of the traders told me he’d traded on my recommendation.. putting $1m into the idea. This is much smaller than the usual trade size, but I still felt sick with nerves. He wouldn’t have done it without thinking it was at least a feasible idea, but it was clearly more of a test of how I would react. He joked that my job prospects hinged on the PnL, and even though I knew he wasn’t being serious I couldn’t help but check Bloomberg every 30 seconds for an updated price. Much to my amazement it actually made a small amount of money and he took it off after a couple of days, I wish I could claim it was skill but it was complete luck.
After the ‘excitement’ of my desk project was over, I remembered my team hadn’t even started the HR project, which would be presented to all four of our line managers. We had decided earlier on to leave it until later, but by this stage we were cutting it fine. Although most of the guys on my desk said it didn’t matter, I still didn’t want it to be a disaster, so we arranged to spend some time on Wednesday afternoon working on it.
With the two projects overlapping, I didn’t have much time to focus on networking with the other desk. Fortunately I bumped into one of the guys in the canteen on Thursday, and ended up spending the afternoon with them. I spent the afternoon talking about the Olympics, much to the dismay of their resident intern, who is a little introverted and clearly hasn’t managed to form a bond with the desk. Whilst I felt guilty stepping on his toes, we only have a few weeks left and I know I’ll regret it if I don’t.
We’re getting towards the end of the program now, and the topic of conversation amongst interns is 99% about jobs. Half of the time people ask about your desk out of interest, but the rest of the time you can tell they’re trying to work out whether or not there’s a job there, and if you’re going to get it. Whilst it makes the days more exciting it can be exhausting. With all the uncertainty on jobs I thought I would ask HR whether or not my desk were hiring, which inevitably produced the vague answer that ‘the bank is always looking to bring in new talent’. Whilst this was by no means a green light, I’ll take it that no news is good news, for now.
