The End to the Internship Search

This is what someone with a job looks like.

It took longer than I would have liked, but finally my internship search has come to an end.

They told us on the first day of our ACT Team meeting (our career sessions led by 2nd years who interned in our specific industries the previous summer) way back in September that if we wanted an internship in Investment Management that a good chunk of us would have to sweat the process out.  A lot of 2nd years hadn't gotten their summer jobs until May or June.  Many more bowed out earlier than that to find positions in industries that had more openings.  They told us very frankly that if we didn't have the stomach to wait things out that we could save ourselves plenty of time and stress if we looked elsewhere earlier.  Even now I'm not sure what combination of dedication, stubbornness and overconfidence it was that made me to decide to stick with it from Day 1, but the warnings of my ACT coaches proved true in our class as well.  Our ACT Team of 30+ people was down to single digits by the winter quarter, and even some of those students came out of interest but were looking at other types of jobs too.  Even half of the students who had found a place on the Student Investment Fund, the most prestigious investment management activity at Anderson, had eventually decided to take internships in other financial verticals. 

So by the time mid-May had rolled around I felt that I was no closer to an internship than when I started looking in the fall.  It's not that I hadn't found opportunities or put in effort.  My resume looks pretty good on paper which helped turn my 30+ applications into 10-15 1st round interviews, a decent conversion rate compared to what I heard from peers.  There were a couple trips to Orange County, multiple 7 am interviews,  countless stock pitch revisions, a timed real estate modeling case study, and lots of close calls (I was down to the final two with both Oaktree Capital and Green Street Advisors and was pretty convinced I had those jobs), but alas nothing had turned into an offer.  As other students continued to solidify their summer plans, I was really starting to feel stressed out more than I had in recent memory and was wondering where exactly I had gone wrong.  Should I have diversified my job search a bit more earlier on?  Should I have put in more legitimate networking efforts in the fall and winter rather than assuming job openings would just materialize?  Or maybe most simply I had just misjudged my skill-set and wasn't actually cut out for this industry.

But whatever the case may be, or whatever mistakes I may have made along the way, the bottom line is that I did finally lock down an internship.  Even during the process, I drew similarities to my job search senior year at Maryland.  I was convinced I wasn't going to find a job then and thought I'd have to move back to Long Island jobless and stay at my parents' home while looking for jobs post-grad.  I ended up getting a late offer at Cambridge, which turned out to be a truly great experience for me and the rest is history.  The point being, that at that time I was very stressed and really doubted myself but looking back I can barely remember it, and it all worked out.  People who I talked to regularly over the past couple months know how down I was about the whole search, but in the grand scheme of things it'll end up being a blip on the map, and hopefully will work out just as well.

My office building this summer

Anyways, enough looking back.  The quick summary on what I will be doing in the future is that I'll be working in a research analyst role for a sub-fund of Dalton Investments, a hedge fund just a couple miles from my apartment in Los Angeles.  The fund itself is a really small long-short domestic equity fund which will have two employees this summer (me and the portfolio manager), although the company/office have several others working on other funds.  I don't know all the details quite yet, but I'll probably be starting up shortly after finals in early or mid June and working around 40 hours a week (getting home by 3:30!) throughout the summer.  Working with just one other guy and sharing an office with him will be a big change of pace from my previous experience at Cambridge, but the portfolio manager seems super knowledgeable about investing and I think it'll be a really good learning experience.  We'll see how things go, but I'm definitely glad to have finally cleared this significant hurdle of my first year of business school.