LSE student with nine spring week banking internships is a sensation
If you want a summer internship in banking, it helps to have a spring week internship. If you want a spring week internship (which takes place in the spring of your first year at university), you need to apply right now. You also need to familiarize yourself with the advice of God’sFavour Oluwanusin, a second year management student at the London School of Economics (LSE), who completed nine spring week internships in his first year.
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Because spring weeks only last for one week, it's possible to participate in a lot of them. Oluwanusin isn't the first LSE student to do so: Haydn Pole, a former economics student, completed 11 spring week internships in 2014 and is now a vice president in debt capital markets (DCM) at Barclays. Unlike Pole, Oluwanusin is, however, sharing his strategy for spring internship abundance on both YouTube (see below) and his own site.
We also spoke to Oluwanusin, who has 3A*s at A level and nine GCSEs at grades 8 or 9. He says he applied to 18 spring internships altogether, a success rate of 50%. "I wanted to apply to the most prominent investment banks that would give me the best platform to start my career with," he tells us.
Oluwanusin did his spring weeks at Lazard, Morgan Stanley, Rothschild, hedge fund DE Shaw, and Bank of America among others. He says he didn't apply to the likes of JPMorgan or Evercore, even though he would have liked to because of technical issues and life simply getting in the way. "I was too busy."
If you want a spring internship at a major bank, Oluwanusin says you'll need to be prepared for a demanding recruitment process which typically includes the application form, psychometric tests, Hirevue-type video interviews and then video interviews involving an actual human being.
Of all the applications he went through, Oluwanusin says Rothschild's was the most involved as it included an assessment centre on Microsoft Teams with three other spring week applicants. This assessment centre included both a case study and an open-ended discussion. If you encounter one of these assessment centres, Oluwanusin says you need to be ready to discuss issues like the relative advantages of debt and equity funding, or whether banks can help fight climate change.
Morgan Stanley's application process was also comparatively challenging. Oluwanusin says it involved a "verbally dictated" telephone interview and that capturing all the information was a challenge.
The big advantage of spring weeks is that they give participants an opportunity to jump the queue for summer internships. Oluwanusin is going to intern at Lazard next summer. He says all his spring weeks offered summer conversion potential, except DE Shaw's, which was a special case.
DE Shaw's special spring week internship
If you want a spring internship at DE Shaw, you will not be able to apply for it.
Confirming an earlier report on Wall Street Oasis, Oluwanusin says you have to be invited to participate in a DE Shaw spring week in London. How do you get invited? DE Shaw didn't tell us, but Oluwanusin suspects he was invited because he had a good CV and internships at multiple banks.
DE Shaw's spring week doesn't offer the potential for conversion into a summer internship, but Oluwanusin says it was his favourite one. It included a trip to the London Eye, a cocktail bar and a large array of fine foods.
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