Best Freshman internship for Rx
Curious for thoughts here. I decided I want to go into RX IB like a month ago, want to become an investor lower on the liquidity premium. I have to respond to a small quant firm for a QR freshman internship. Later in the summer I also have an offer for a special sits job at a large asset manager.
Recently have been flying out cold emails at local distressed shops and got responses from a small special site HF and MM PE. If any of these materialize (unlikely) should I swap out my QR internship, or would it not make a difference given that I will have some credit related exp later in the summer.
the new places are gonna be unpaid, the quant shop is paying pretty well for a freshman gig (like 14k for the summer).
Very solid freshman year experience, have seen worse resumes get rx offers. Would say your time is better spent looking for sophomore summer offers to lock that down and start prepping rx technicals.
Thoughts on if I should take one of these distressed focused roles if I get lucky over my QR job? All of the names probably aren’t as strong as my internship in the latter half of the summer, but solid. Idk how quant research would look on an RX resume.
on soph summer, looks like that all starts in sept for non diverse
on QR- if I see quant at a known shop or similar on a resume I think "this guy is smart." Obviously a credit/distressed/rx internship would look better and maybe even IB or PE may be more directly relevant, but I think you should take time to explore other interests as well. There are diminishing returns to have so many distressed internships on your resume, not that it will ever be bad, but its ok if you don't have a ton of distressed internships. Again, it takes time to find roles, just think about where you can best focus your time.
on soph year- whatever outreach you are doing, if a legit distressed firm would hire you now for the upcoming summer, hard to think they would be adverse to hiring you for next summer.
quick note- you will still include your soph summer upcoming internship on any resume you submit to a bank. This means assuming you can get one of these distressed roles soph summer your resume will read Quant, Special sits, Distressed when you submit for your junior SA roles. This is a phenomenal resume.
Fwiw, both the QR role and the distressed Hf are at pretty unknown shops (around 200 mil aum). If that changes the picture at all. QR role is in a very niche asset class (think esoterics, fertilizer futures, etc.) the distressed Hf is basically a tiny family office. People at both shops who interned ended up at either MM in the strat for the first one or Tier1/Tier2 RX for the distressed place. typically took them freshman or sophomore summer.
didn’t know you can list incoming. That changes the decision a lot then, thanks. Still might learn towards the distressed shop just because there are so few funds that take interns for next year.
Work at a top RX shop. A couple things:
Don’t believe the liquidity premium crap you hear about distressed.
Past internships don’t really matter once you get to the interview stage, unless you’re interning at Apollo or something. One distressed/special sits experience is more than enough to demonstrate interest. Don’t worry about dropping your paid QR internship for an unpaid internship if you already have the QR one.
Past internships really don’t matter. If we have one kid with a distressed internship and one kid with an FP&A internship and the FP&A kid interviewed better, we’re taking the FP&A kid.
Stop wasting your time posting about hypotheticals that haven’t happened.
I understand the urge to do this because I was guilty of this myself, but don’t benchmark your freshman and sophomore internships by seeing where those people ended up junior year summer. That’s just not how this all works. Each person goes through recruiting individually and gets the offer based on their merits in the interview process. Don’t try to draw a pattern where there is none and don’t delude yourself into thinking xyz freshman/sophomore internship always feeds to abc rx firm.
thanks, looks like QR is obvious with the comp. I appreciate all the is insights here def helpful.
curious why you say that about liquidity premium. Seems like distressed/special sits is one of the few public markets roles where deep research and knowledge of litigation finance can differentiate. Don’t want to change topic of thread but interested why you say that.
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