Bank of America is hiring lots of juniors. Nearly one year on from the death of Moritz Erhardt, it was reported this morning that Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) has hiked its intake of analysts and associates by 40% in 2014 compared to 2013. This applies equally to summer interns, of whom there are 40% more at BAML this summer than last summer.
So, who will you find working late if you happen to go to King Edward Street, One Bryant Park, and other BAML offices this summer? Our research suggests that BAML’s inflated intern pool is filled with people such as…
1. The perennial interns
As we like to point out often, you won’t get a summer internship in an investment bank now unless you’ve done a whole heap of internships in an investment bank already. Bank of America’s interns confirm this mantra. Take, for example, Nikhil Vora, a summer analyst in London. Before joining BAML’s summer programme, Vora had already spent four months on two separate intern programmes at Morgan Stanley and a few weeks on the spring intern programme at the Financial Conduct Authority.
2. The super-academics from the top schools
Banks like to hire the academically gifted, and BAML seems to have maintained its standards even while increasing its intake. Vora has three A levels at grade A or A* and nine GCSEs at A or A*. He’s studying at the London School of Economics, where he’s expected to achieve a first.
3. The people who have made the most of every single Insight and Discovery day going
It’s not just about summer internships and spring weeks. If you want to get into banking, you should also avail yourself of every chance you can get to meet bankers and to find out what the finance industry is about. You will have an especially large number of these chances if you’re a woman or minority, or both. Simone Osei-Owusu, also an intern in BAML’s London office, shows how to work it. Osei-Owusu has already interned at Morgan Stanley, Google and Goldman Sachs. She’s also attended workshops and open days at Bloomberg, BP, Citi, Deloitte. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, PWC and RBS.
4. The cosmopolitan linguists
In Europe it helps to speak a few languages if you want to work in a client-facing investment banking job. Interning at BAML’s London office this summer are people like Christopher Hirschman, a modern languages student at Durham University. Hirschman last worked as a wine tour guide in Italy. Hirschman’s candidacy was undoubtedly improved by the fact that he too had undertaken several spring weeks (at Citi and at BAML).
5. The young people who’ve set up entire companies of their own
As per the advice provided by a clandestine banker last week, it’s no good applying to banks and pretending you’re an entrepreneur when you’ve done nothing more than set up a website. If you want to impress, you actually need to set up a company. And it will need to sell something.
New Jersey-based BAML intern Jun Wang is onto this. Wang boasts that he is the co-founder and COO of American Dream Household Inc, a company that seemingly sells kitchen and bathroom products and has four salespeople of its own.
6. The students who’ve won competitions that helped them stand out
If you want to be an intern at Bank of America, it helps to enter competitions. And it helps to win. Take Jacob Cooper, an investment banking summer analyst at BAML in New York City this year. In 2013, Cooper won the Duke University Barclays-sponsored equity research competition.
BAML has also employed a selection of other competition winners. Wang, for example, won a ‘stock pitch competition’ in 2013. Simone Deifta, an intern in London, won a gold medal in the UK ‘Senior Mathematical Challenge’.
7. The students who were ‘campus ambassadors’
If you want to get in with a bank, it helps to be one of their ‘campus ambassadors’ persuading other students to join them. Deifta falls into this category, for example.
8. The students who’ve set up their own elite finance societies
As the anonymous banker pointed out last week, it’s no good just being a member of a finance society at a university – you need to set up your own. Take Martin Yang, a summer analyst at BAML in San Francisco. Yang set up a ‘Student Managed Investment Fund’ at the University of Richmond. He says this was established as, “the most prestigious program open to a rigorously selected cadre of 17 finance students,” – seemingly with Yang at the helm.
Related articles:
How to ace an internship at Goldman Sachs
Are these the best businesses in the best banks if you’re doing a banking internship this year?
A year on from the death of Moritz Erhardt, what can banking interns expect this summer?
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