This summer for four weeks before summer school, I interned at Sandler O’Neill & Partners in New York City with the investment banking group.
My main job was to assist the analysts with their work. Some of the tasks involved helping develop “pitch books,” which are slide decks that investment bankers bring to potential clients to win their business. A great deal of time is spent on preparing these books and they often contain detailed information on the bank’s services in the client’s industry, potential transactions that may be of interest to the client, and other detailed information beneficial to clients in making decisions on whether to hire Sandler O’Neill to assist them. I also worked with analysts on making presentations for clients where we advised and modeled specific transactions. While developing these presentations, a few of the things I learned included how to make stock charts, loan and deposit charts and peer group analyses. In addition to creating these presentations, I got to participate in conference calls, attend meetings and travel to an out-of-state client meeting.
Beyond the technical excel skills I learned, I learned how well my student-athlete experience at Notre Dame has prepared me for the working world, specifically investment banking. Heading into the internship, many people threateningly threw around the 80-100 hour work weeks of investment banking. Although, I was not working 100 hours a week, my roughly 14-hour days felt manageable. I attribute handling the long working days to the combination of the exciting work material and being acclimated to my long school days. At school, starting with 6:15 a.m. lifts followed by classes, practice and homework until late into the night, the 14-hour days felt neither foreign to me nor too difficult to manage.