How LSE student Haydn Pole landed 11 finance internships
As we reported yesterday, Haydn Pole, a student at the London School of Economics (LSE), has completed 11 finance internships. This is despite only being in the first term of his second year.
Pole's internships were 'spring weeks' and 'insight days' rather than full-blooded ten week summer internships. But they're still pretty impressive. So, how did he do it?
He tells us that he learned early how hard it is to get a job in banking, and therefore made a determined effort to achieve a spring week place as a stepping stone to the all-important summer internship.
"I applied (unsuccessfully) to J.P. Morgan's GCSE programme in secondary school, and realised how competitive the programmes are," says Cole. "Coming to the LSE, I met a number of incredibly competitive well-qualified people and for the first three or four months of the first year, I applied to pretty much every single spring programme (with only a part time job on my CV) and received offers from a Barclays, RBC Capital Markets and Deloitte."
Then came Cole's touch of genius and the thing that enabled him to turn three internships into 11. "Having received offers, I put out a fresh CV with 'offer accepted as positions listed' and applied to more insight days/programmes," says Cole. "I kept on doing this throughout the academic year."
Put simply, having gained several internship offers, Cole reapplied to banks that had turned him down. Realizing that he was popular with their competitors, they then accepted him. Cole's internship offers snowballed.
His success wasn't just down to this though. Cole points out that he put in "massive amounts of research", but into banks' programmes and into their company profiles for his cover letters. He used the LSE careers service to check his CV and cover letters and has a long history of presenting in public, which made it easier for him to handle banks' assessment centres.
[efc_twitter text="Want to work in banking when you graduate? This is how it's done."]
