Discover your dream Career
For Recruiters

"I am a student in the UK. I spent £3k trying to get a banking internship. Please help"

I am an international student, based in the UK. I desperately want to work in trading in an investment bank. I have now graduated without a job despite spending thousands of pounds on an industry insider who said they could help me.

Click here to join the bubble by eFinancialCareers, our new anonymous community. Follow eFinancialCareers on Google News here. 

I found the insider on LinkedIn. I was networking there as I prepared for summer internship applications and I approached a young trader at a leading US bank. He mentioned that he sometimes gave classes to students and we got talking.

He ended up tutoring me for an hour or so a week for a few months. He was very knowledgeable and really knew his stuff. I paid him around £3k ($4.1k) for his help and he told me that he would be able to refer me to HR as I was such a strong candidate.

I don't think he did that. I am not even sure now whether he worked for the bank he claimed to work for and I don't think he was a trader.

Either way, I spent the money but I have no internship or job. I ended up applying for 50 internships in total, all without success. I was at a non-target university.

What do I do? 

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22  Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. 

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.

author-card-avatar
AUTHORAmanda Kresge Insider Comment
  • Ho
    Horseradish
    4 February 2026
    I’ll be honest I don’t feel much sympathy. From my perspective, it sometimes feels like people can try to buy their way into a career path: international student, non-target university, paying thousands for extra support... it's nearly a cliché I see a version of this even in my own building: a student living next door can afford (daddy's money) the same place it took me years in banking to reach, and still behaves in a way that disrupts everyone at night with noise. The contrast is hard to ignore. At the end of the day, though, credibility and qualifications for top roles can’t simply be bought, they still have to be earned. Even top students don’t automatically land roles in leading institutions, so why you you by simply paying? Banking, at its core, is still a merit-driven culture.

Sign up to Morning Coffee!

Coffee mug

The essential daily roundup of news and analysis read by everyone from senior bankers and traders to new recruits.

Sign up to Morning Coffee!

Coffee mug

The essential daily roundup of news and analysis read by everyone from senior bankers and traders to new recruits.