You are excited, prepared, but slightly exhausted. The internship hasn’t even started yet. You’ve read that article twice now. That Youtuber can’t seem to upload fast enough, and you’ve already watched every advice video on how to get the return offer. It’s all starting to look the same. However, it’s never enough.
That’s ok. It’s normal. Take a deep breath, and read this article too. I’ve gone through it, and I’m here to help you achieve more than I did.
I just finished my two years as a part of the Microsoft Finance Rotation Program. If you are about to start your FRP experience or a finance job at any of the large tech companies, I recommend first starting with my 7 tips for your first job out of college video, made specifically for finance and business graduates.
Finance internships at Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon are changing. They are harder to get into and expect more from you. As an intern, you need to make a lasting impact on your team, and you need to do it quickly. Let’s get started.
The advice and tips I’ve seen for FAANG and big tech interns around the web are too general, or engineering focused. While suggesting to relax and speak up will always be true, the advice isn’t specific to corporate finance jobs and internships. Entry level finance jobs are about proving your technical modeling skills, interpreting data, and creating foundational business and social relationships in and out of work. The general goal of an internship stays the same regardless of discipline: get the return offer. However, the hard and soft skills you need to get it are different.
Here are 5 practical tips to make an impact as a finance intern.
Learn the Basic Organizational Structure and Business Processes
Questions to ask yourself:
- Who is the boss of your immediate organization? What are their priorities?
- Who does your team interact with the most? Why?
- What is your team’s mission statement, goal, or charter?
- How does your manager operate within your organization?
- What are your manager’s biggest pain points?
Learn this information as fast as you can. This will help you pick up more info from conversations your team will (inevitably) have about business. If someone’s name is mentioned or a workstream is tossed around, you will know exactly WHO is talking about WHAT. If a term is unfamiliar, look it up in your company’s glossary or ask your manager.
Learning the organizational structure of your company will bring you to a baseline understanding of: who has decision-making power, who can answer your questions, who can become a potential mentor. Learn it fast and spend time choosing your relationships later.
While organizational structure will help you define who, business processes will define what. Your main job as an intern is to make the best impact in the shortest amount of time. If your manager has a pre-defined project for you to accomplish, great. Once you’ve done that, however, there is always room to find another pain point and clear that up too. Suddenly, you’ve not only beat expectations, but made it clear you are proactive and effective.
Practice finding the data
Questions to ask yourself:
- What tools does your team use to pull financial data? Is it a public or proprietary (internal) tool?
- Which member of my team is proficient in pulling the information they need?
- Do I need to learn SQL to pull the data I need?
- Can I pull the data for the products/services that my team covers?
- How can I automate pulling the data? Can someone else do it for me?
- How is the data I pull formatted? How does my manager like data formatted?
If you are interning at a large tech company, you are probably dealing with a version of SAP or an internal tool that spits data into Excel. This is my second tip: spend a lot of time upfront learning how to gather and pull the data you need. After you’ve done that, spend twice the amount of time learning how to interpret that data than you think you’ll need. Focus on accuracy rather than speed.
Data gathering shouldn’t be your problem, ever. In finance, your priority is knowing your numbers before your partners do, and being an expert in how everything lands. You don’t want to be wasting time pulling data when it matters. Learn to pull in the right data, every time.
If you need to learn SQL to pull the information you need, I recommend going through the interactive tutorials at SQL Bolt. In finance and supply chain, you will never regret taking the time to learn SQL. It’s so widely used and embedded in company stacks that I consider it one of the timeless skills of this lifetime (like JavaScript 😂).
P.S The next timeless skill will be building smart contracts in Solidity.
The first impression matters
Before we get to the questions in the section, I’m assuming you are meeting someone in your organization for the first time, or meeting your manager or someone you will work with for the first time. How you interact with the person will set the tone for the rest of your internship. After you’ve set a professional tone, you have the freedom blend the lines between work and personal, if you so desire.
Questions to ask yourself:
- What is the purpose of this meeting? Can the agenda be shared beforehand?
- What are two - three actionable steps that can come out of this meeting?
- Do I even need to be here? What business context can I get from being a fly on the wall?
- I’m going into a one on one meeting, do I have questions prepared if the conversation dies down?
- How can I help the person I am talking to? How can they help me on my internship project?
- Does this conversation immediately align with my interests?
- What are common interests (or hobbies) I share with this person?
Between working on your project and interacting with your cohort, you will be spending a large amount of time networking and talking to business partners. Here is my third tip: the first impression really matters. Every meeting you have should have a purpose, even if the purpose is getting to know the other person better.
While there are many teams that are good at this, interns are easily distracted by their desire to succeed. Don’t fall into this trap. Be practical, and conduct meetings with a goal in hand. Preferably, you are meeting to 1) introduce yourself or 2) execute on a decision that has already been decided. People are busy, but are happy to talk to interns that provide value, are interested in what they have to say, and ask good questions.
Propose solutions, don’t ask what to do
Questions to ask yourself:
- What is the low hanging fruit of the problem assigned to me?
- What is the minimum effort required to find an answer?
- How can I improve the solution or answer I found?
- Does the data really support my answer or findings?
- Is there an actionable next step from my finding? If not, what is missing?
Let’s take an example. You’ve been asked by your manager to understand how much call centers are costing us (this is a real example). You pull the data into Excel, do a quick model of each call center, and send an email to your manager concluding that the call center in Tennessee (just an example) costs the most money to run while the call center in Wyoming costs the least.
What just happened is another common mistake interns face. I’m guilty of this too. You were asked to do something, and you did it just as asked. Unfortunately, that’s the problem. Your manager is actually requesting more than just what. In this example, she’s asking you to figure out:
1) Which call center costs the most
2) Which call center costs the least
3) Why it costs that much to run
4) How we can reduce the cost of expensive call centers
5) Who we can talk to immediately about fixing spend
Here is the basic formula. First, answer the question. Second, understand why the answer is what it is. Third, figure out what action you can take to set the business on the right path. Be proactive, propose solutions, don’t ask your manager what to do. Try it out yourself first, and then ask. If you’ve completed all your projects and need more work, that’s a different situation.
Plan to stretch your project anyway
Questions to ask yourself:
- How can I extend the life of my project after I leave my internship?
- What do I need to do so my team talks about me after I leave? (good things, obviously)
- Is there a workstream that is dependent on my project?
- Is my project important enough to hand off to someone at the end of my internship?
- How much real impact is the work I’m doing helping my team?
One of the best pieces of advice I got while I was interning was to make sure your team remembers you and the work you’ve done. That way, you will be able to lock in the return offer and the team will think of you when new opportunities come up.
Stretching your project doesn’t have to be hard. Spend some time thinking about how your project is used by your business partners. If it’s used repeatedly and requires updating, you’ve hit the jackpot. I’m assuming you’ll build with a level of quality and business excellence that comes with working at the highest level. Keep your solutions simple, influence your colleagues to use them, show it to members of your intern cohort, and you are on your way to a return offer and a great career.
What’s next?
I’d recommend implementing all these tips within the first two weeks of your internship. You have a very limited amount of time to get a lot of work done, so act fast and think quickly.
If any part of this post helped you out, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on twitter. The next section is a list of resources I used to achieve more in my internship and get the return offer I wanted. There are a vast collection of reading material out there if you’d like to get the leg up before your internship begins. Good luck!
Resources and Reading Material
Finished your internship?
Done with your internship? Didn’t get that return offer? Here is my list of the best full-time finance rotation programs to apply to.