The ex-Goldman Sachs VP on a mission to help students with banking internships

Getting a first job at Goldman Sachs is not easy. Nor is getting a first job at any other major bank. As students in the UK struggle to start their financial services careers, one former Goldman Sachs vice president (VP) is trying to make a difference. 

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“The status quo in finance is that you need an internship to get an internship,” says Zhan Shi. “I personally don’t stand by that.”

Shi spent five years working in financial services after graduating from the University of Oxford. She’s a software developer and spent half that time working in engineering for Deutsche Bank and the other half working for Goldman Sachs in London. Shi left Goldman in 2024 and is now CEO of Career26, a platform for helping young people into banking careers.

Zhan is working with students like Liv Bowditch at UCL and Erasmus Yeo at Imperial. 

Yeo has actually got an internship this summer at a private capital advisory firm. He says this internship didn’t come easy: “I made over 200 applications; it was incredibly stressful.”

Bowditch doesn’t have a finance internship. Like many students, she says she didn’t appreciate that she wanted to work in finance early enough in her first year at university. She therefore didn’t apply for the spring week programmes that act as a slipstream to summer internships and then to graduate jobs. “I have a background in politics and I didn’t initially appreciate the intersection between politics, markets and policy,” she tells us.  

Now that Bowditch does want to work in banking, it seems too late. She graduates next June and has spent over a year working as a part time communications advisor at the House of Commons. Bowditch is keen and able, but she hasn’t completed a banking internship previously and she doesn’t have an internship for this summer. This seems to be the end of her finance aspirations.

Shi would have it otherwise. “Career26 was set up to address a persistent gap: many students are motivated to pursue finance, but struggle to access or understand how the industry actually works beyond formal pathways such as internships,” she tells us. Career26 is organising a one-day student summit this October. There will be speakers from the likes of Goldman Sachs, BlackRock and Man Group. 

The intention is to demystify finance careers, says Shi. The summit aims to be as accessible as possible to “younger, inexperienced students” and students from lower social economic backgrounds. It’s about skills, not “pedigree.” 

“We want the kids to find role models early from the senior speakers, identify a career path that suits them based on real-person stories,” says Shi. Panellists are intentionally drawn from different roles across banking, trading, hedge funds and venture capital. After attending the summit and identifying a desired career path, students can revert to the platform and inform themselves further.

“We are trying to make the case that the current recruitment system isn’t working,” says Bowditch. "You need experience to get experience and there's a real problem of finance accidentally filtering out students from lower income backgrounds and universities where people are less aware of the recruitment timeline."

Whether attending a summit will compensate for the lack of an internship remains to be seen, but it can't do any harm.

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