For students pursuing a career in finance, the investment banking internship is one of the most decisive moments. It largely determines whether you can break into the industry or not.
If you perform well during the summer internship, you will receive a return offer. This is the ideal outcome and what you should strive for. You can enjoy your final year in school, knowing that your spot in the industry is secure.
If you don’t receive a return offer from the summer internship, circumstances become very challenging. Your will have to go through the full-time (FT) recruiting process. As of 2025, FT recruiting begins in August, right after completion of the Summer Analyst / Summer Associate internship program. Unfortunately, the FT recruiting process becomes extremely difficult without a return offer. Other banks will ask you if you received a return offer. As a result, not having one is a huge red flag for employers.
Here’s an example from a student who emailed a banker at Moelis regarding full-time recruiting. The first thing the banker asked was whether the student received a return offer.
Therefore, if you are an incoming intern, your number one priority is to receive a return offer from the internship. That’s the whole point of doing the internship – to secure a full-time investment banking job.
In this article, we will teach you how to prepare for your Investment Banking Summer Analyst and Summer Associate program. Everything we write here is applicable to both IBD Summer Analysts and Summer Associates. We’re including a lot of specific advice and practical actions in this article. If you follow these advices and take these actions, your chances of getting a return offer will increase drastically.
This Article’s Logical Flow
As an incoming Summer Analyst / Summer Associate, your goal is to secure a return offer. Whether you can secure a return offer is a function of luck and performance. Luck is outside of your control. For example, if there’s a sudden financial crisis and the bank cuts return offers by 50%, that’s bad luck. You can’t control the economy so focus on what you can control: performance. In order to perform well, you need to be good at doing whatever tasks people tell you to do. In order to be good at doing these tasks, you need to practice in advance. In order to practice in advance, you need to know what these tasks are.
Consequently, we’ll first establish what you’ll do as an IBD summer interns. Then we’ll go over how to prepare for them before the internship begins. That’s the logical flow underpinning this article.
I. What Do Investment Banking Interns Do?
As an Investment Banking Summer Analyst, most of your time is spent on four things: 1) Excel (non-financial modeling), 2) PowerPoint, 3) Research and 4) Administrative Support.
Notice that “Financial Modeling” is not up there. For those of you who are very into financial modeling, please tamper your expectations. Learning financial modeling can be helpful when it comes to interview prep. However, the actual IBD internship generally involves very little financial modeling work. We’ll explain more below.
IBD Intern Responsibility #1: Excel (Non-Financial Modeling)
As a Summer Analyst / Summer Associate, you will spend a huge amount of time in Excel. You use Excel primarily to create tables and charts for presentations.
In investment banking, bankers work with clients on transactions. When bankers speak to clients, they have to point the clients to some reference material, so that clients understand what they’re talking about instead of staring blank into space. Therefore, in general, a lot of work in banking is creating presentations for these calls and meetings with clients. Not every meeting, but a lot of them. These presentations generally include a lot of tables and charts unrelated to financial modeling. Without these tables and charts, the presentation will just be walls of texts.
As an example, take a look at the following page from PWP’s presentation.
This is a pretty standard page that commonly assigned to interns. The upper right section “Financial Highlights” may appear to be a financial model at first glance, but it’s not. It’s a table containing data entries of historical factual data. The lower left section “Share Price Performance” is a stock price chart and the lower right section “AUM Breakdown” are two pie charts.
All of these three selected sections in the presentation are made in Excel. And all of them are representative of the Excel work that interns have to do. We have an Excel course that will teach you how to make these tables and charts.
Excel is in a league on its own when it comes to significance during the internship, far ahead of PowerPoint. If bankers create so many presentations, why is Excel so much more important than PowerPoint? Because the main ingredients that go into the presentation (i.e. tables and charts) are CREATED in Excel. You just paste them into PowerPoint.
IBD Intern Responsibility #2: PowerPoint
In addition to Excel, you will spend a lot of time working in PowerPoint. However, the work in PowerPoint is a lot simpler and more straightforward than Excel. All the heavy lifting (i.e. tables and charts) is done in Excel. The most common things in PowerPoint is adding section headers and borders, writing bullet points, and inserting shapes. Let’s continue with the previous page so you know exactly what we’re talking about.
On this presentation page, the page title, the four section headers and borders, the text box with bullet points, the shape inserts, and the text box with footnotes are what you create in PowerPoint.
You will certainly utilize many more features than what’s shown on this single page. However, this should illustrate the point and help you understand what you create in Excel versus in PowerPoint. The big ingredients that go into the presentation are done in Excel.
Let’s look at another PowerPoint example. Here is a page from Qatalyt’s investment banking presentation. This is also representative of what deal teams typically assign to Summer Analysts & Summer Associates.
This page is very tedious and time consuming to make. Analysts can probably create the earlier page from PWP faster than they can create this page. The issue with this page is that it’s very time consuming to search for all the logos. You have to search these logos one by one on the internet. A couple of things to note here. First, the logos have to be current. That means you have to confirm it’s the same logo the company is currently using and not some older version. Second, the logos have to be “high quality”. A lot of logos in search results are blurry. This search process is tedious work and naturally, full-timers assign it to interns.
IBD Intern Responsibility #3: Research
The third common responsibility of interns is to do research. What do you do research on? You research whatever the deal team needs. Oftentimes, it’s researching something tedious and time-consuming to find that the full-timers don’t want to deal with. Once you finish the research, you organize the data and produce tables and charts (in Excel) and put them in PowerPoint.
Here are some examples of easy research. Research a company management’s biography. Find out the legal and compliance software’s market size in 2026. Find out how online market spend is projected to change over next 5 years. These are all very straightforward and it involves finding the right research report.
Here are some examples of hard research. Gather a list of all data centers in Minnesota and New Jersey along with each data center’s key metrics. Create a list of precedents where the controlling shareholder is either on the executive management team or the Board of Directors and made a bid for the company. You likely have to find each data point manually, as opposed to being able to reference a website or report containing all data points. Consequently, these research tasks are very tedious and time consuming. Naturally, full-timers hate them and send them to interns.
IBD Intern Responsibility #4: Administrative Support
As an Investment Banking Summer Analyst or Summer Associate, you are also responsible for a lot of administrative tasks.
These administrative tasks include business-related ones like taking notes on calls & meetings, sending out daily / weekly updates, and creating “Public Information Books” (“PIBs”). PIB is a big one in this category because it’s usually for VP / MD. A PIB is usually a PDF file that allows the reader to easily catch up on the company by aggregating all the individual documents related to the company that one would have to read. Usually, these documents include recent 10-K, 10-Q, some research reports, and big recent news, if any. The purpose of the PIB is to help the banker (who’s probably on the road) to conveniently catch up on the company in one single file.
They can also include less interesting work, such as grabbing coffee, picking up pizza, physically delivering a package to a client across the city, collecting people’s availabilities for a conference call, setting up calendar invites, etc.
Don’t Underestimate Administrative Support Tasks
The underlying principle here is that as an intern, it is your responsibility to make the life of the deal team easy. Let’s use an analogy from Game of Thrones. Those who want to become a knight have to be a squire for a knight first. That means carrying the knight’s equipment, cleaning the armor, taking care of the horse, etc. Doing these support tasks well is the first step to becoming a knight.
It’s the same thing in banking. You are the squire! If bankers ask you to pick up pizza, run and make sure you bring it back hot. They ask you to get them coffee? Take notes on their taste preferences and save them so you don’t need to bother them again. They ask you to find a restaurant for the team to go out to? You better make sure to find the ideal restaurant.
Administrative support tasks affect people’s perception of you. These tasks are so frequently underestimated by interns who think that they’re not “real” work. This is absolutely real work. Ultimately, whether you get a return offer is based on whether the people you intern for vouch for you. And there’s no rule obligating full-timers to evaluate you based on what you consider to be “real work”. Frankly, if you are awful at this enough that people hate you, they can just say you were bad at things you consider to be “real work”. Ultimately, it’s their words that decide whether you get a return offer.
In the TV show Suits, there’s a scene where the office tasks Mike Ross, a rookie Associate hire, to find a restaurant for the rookie dinner. Mike questions the task’s significance and Harvey Specter explains why he should take these tasks seriously (and you should too).
Why Don’t Interns Build Financial Models?
Notice that financial modeling is not one of interns’ main responsibilities. While learning financial modeling is helpful to prepare for interviews, the actual internship involves very little financial modeling. A lot of Summer Analysts will briefly or lightly touch the models during their internship. Some might even run the model. But overall, most interns are not spending most of their time building financial models. Why is that?
Reason 1: Analysts Will Be Stuck with Someone Else’s Model
The first reason is that the Analysts will be stuck with someone else’s model when the internship ends. This is something that students generally fail to appreciate because students haven’t experienced this yet. Inheriting someone else’s model is very inconvenient. Easy changes become difficult because the model is not built in the flow natural to one’s thought process and therefore more prone to mistakes. Everyone has their own style of modeling and the intern’s way, which could be correct, is foreign to the inheriting analyst. And when intern leaves, the Analyst is stuck with a model someone else built. The Analyst will probably have to rebuild the model from scratch, doing the work all over again.
Reason 2: Analysts Need the Financial Modeling Experience Themselves
The second reason is that the Analysts might desire to have the modeling experience. You’re not the only one who want the financial modeling experience. The Analysts need the experience too, especially if it’s a live deal. When the deal closes, they want to be able to say they’re the ones who built it. Why would they want to give such valuable experience to you? This is especially the case if the Analysts have not yet secured a buyside offer or don’t have many closed deals under their name.
Reason 3: Analysts Are Held Responsible for Any Mistakes
Analysts who allow Summer Analysts to run the model are responsible for the model’s accuracy. Deal team holds Analysts responsible for the model so they can build it themselves or give it to the interns. If the model is wrong, Analysts can’t just blame the Summer Analysts. The view is that interns make mistakes because they’re interns but the Analysts are supposed to catch them. That’s awful incentive dynamics. The interns get all the upside (financial modeling experience) while the Analysts bear all the downside (check the interns’ work and get the blame for mistakes).
Reason 4: Analysts Can Do It Better and Faster
Analysts simply have way more experience building financial models than Summer Analysts. They can get off work earlier doing it themselves than having to wait for the Summer Analysts to finish, check their work, write feedback, and wait for the Summer Analysts to incorporate the feedback. Letting interns build models require the Analyst to invest significant time into the interns’ development.
For all the above reasons, you’re asking a lot from Analysts when you ask to run the model. Analysts can certainly make a sacrifice and do you a HUGE FAVOR by letting you build the financial model. But you shouldn’t expect them to and take that for granted. Analysts are certainly not obligated to inconvenience themselves for your benefit. And that’s why the vast majority of interns will spend way more time in Excel doing tables and charts for pitchbooks than financial modeling.
II. How to Prepare for Investment Banking Internship
At this point, hopefully you have a better understand of what you’ll be doing as an IBD intern. They are primarily 1) Excel (non-financial modeling), 2) PowerPoint, 3) Research and 4) Administrative Support. For the vast majority of interns, they might get to do a little bit of financial modeling. However, the VAST majority of the time is spent in Excel building tables and charts unrelated to financial modeling.
OK, so knowing this, how should you prepare for the internship program in advance?
1. Learn Excel, Specifically for Investment Banking
First (this is by far the most important), you should learn how to make tables and charts in Excel that meet the standards that you see in the investment banking presentations. Most of the ingredients that go into a presentation are tables and charts. The interns who can do them very well will save the Analyst and Associates a ton of time. They become very valuable members of the team and are usually the star interns.
Nearly all investment banks use Microsoft Windows by the way. Not Mac. You need to learn how to use Excel in Microsoft Windows.
Here’s a pitfall to avoid. Most Excel courses focus on learning lots of different functions in Excel (i.e. INDIRECT, CONCATENATE). These are not the right Excel courses for investment banking internship prep. It’s not about how to use hundreds of different functions in Excel. It’s about how to use Excel to make the tables and charts that you will have to make during the internship.
10X EBITDA has an online course focused entirely on using Excel for investment banking tasks. It’s taught by a former Goldman Sachs banker and you will learn how to create professional tables and charts. It’s entirely online and you will have lifetime access to the course. The best thing is that it’s designed to help you gain the skillset in 3-days. That’s right – we designed the curriculum so that you will learn how to use Excel for investment banking in just 3 days. It’s not like the other courses that ask you to spend weeks learning obscure things in Excel like VBA, which probably 99% of interns will never use.
2. Learn Technicals
While you won’t be doing a lot of financial modeling, you still need to learn financial modeling for the internship because of two reasons. First, a lot of the non-modeling work and understanding what’s going on at work require strong technicals. Second, while you won’t be spending most of your time on financial modeling, you probably will need to do some modeling.
Don’t focus on the obscure technicals like how tax assets are treated in random situations or accounting rules governing rare leases. Nobody cares. Focus on the most important stuff: Enterprise Value / Equity Value, M&A, DCF, LBO, etc.
There is one technical topic that is particularly important for interns to know: Treasury Stock Method (TSM). TSM deserves special mention because it’s the technical topic that most interns will utilize heavily during the internship. Yet, take a look through the common interview prep guides and you’ll find that TSM is only briefly mentioned. As a result, most interns aren’t familiar with this topic as well as they should be. Why is TSM so important for interns? Because one of the most popular non-modeling tasks for interns is to “spread comps”.
The final product after spreading comps is a table like the above. To calculate the valuation multiples, you must research each company’s filings and use TSM to calculate impact from dilutive securities (“spreading comps”). Analysts usually assign this to interns. And every year, many interns fail at this because they don’t know TSM. Don’t be one of them.
The Financial Modeling Course we sell on our website will prepare you for finance technicals very well. You can finish the entire course in 1 week. The course covers TSM in Module #3. It will also prepare you very well for the any model-related work you’ll get during your internship.
3. Housing
Make everything else in your life easy during the internship so you can focus 100% on the internship. A big way to do that is to live close to the office. So please don’t pick apartments that require 45min commute in the morning. Pick a place that’s ideally within walking distance.
These three things are the most important things you can do before your internship.
Conclusion
As an intern, your number one goal is to obtain a return offer. It’s not to do the most interesting or fancy work during the internship. In case you haven’t noticed, the overarching theme in investment banking internship is that you are supposed to do the things nobody else wants to do. As an intern, your mindset should be to add value to your deal team. You add value by making their life easier and if that means doing these tedious, boring, unglamorous tasks, you should happily do it because they contribute to your return offer.
Online Resources
Learn Excel for Investment Banking in 3 Days (Online Course)
Learn Financial Modeling in 1 Week (Online Course)
Hidden Advice
Putting this all the way at the bottom so only serious readers will find this. One thing you can do is buy some gummy vitamins. They’re not for you, though you can certainly eat them yourself. They’re to serve as a desk attraction. Full-timers will come over and eat them and you get to naturally break the ice and start conversations with colleagues. Analysts and Associates might get to know you better and ask you to join their team. You might get to chat with a senior banker that you otherwise don’t have access to. Get Vitamin B12 (boosts energy), Vitamin C (immune support) or Vitamin D (bankers don’t get enough sunlight). Choose one and bring them to office AFTER you hit the desk (not during training).
About 10X EBITDA
We are a small team composed of former investment banking professionals from Goldman Sachs and investment professionals from the world’s top private equity firms and hedge funds, such as KKR, TPG, Carlyle, Warburg, D.E. Shaw, Citadel, etc. Our mission is to cultivate the next generation of top talent for Wall Street and to help candidates bring their careers to new heights. We’re based in the United States, but we have expertise across Europe and Asia as well.
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