eFinancialCareers

Only 50% to 60% of people who complete an investment bank's summer internship are offered a full-time graduate job. How can you ensure you're one of them?

Here's some advice from graduate recruiters and interns who made the grade.

Identify where the jobs are. Not every desk or team that takes on an intern will have a vacancy for a full time graduate recruit, warns Philip Stadniczenk, a former physics student at St. Anne's College, Oxford, who interned two summers ago in the equity research department of JPMorgan. "Whether you receive an offer depends upon whether the desk you work on has any openings," he says. "If they don't, talk to the graduate recruiters and ask to be moved on, or ask them to recommend you to another desk that does have a vacancy."

Be prepared to work long and hard. Internships are intended as a realistic introduction to the world of banking, so don't expect to rock in at 9.30am each morning and leave at 5.30pm each afternoon. "I arrived at 6am every morning," says Stadniczenk. "On a good day I'd go home between 6pm and 7pm. But if required I'd stay until 10pm."

Be innovative. At JPMorgan, Stadniczenk says he came up with a way of predicting shipments of PCs in his spare time. "I drew on my physics modelling background and developed a new kind of model," he says. "It was very useful – I got to meet more people in the firm than I would otherwise, and was given more responsibility as a result. You need to show that you can add value and do things that other interns can't".

Put yourself about. "You need to build an understanding of how everything links in and works together," says Satheesh Nadarajah, who works in institutional client sales at Deutsche Bank and is a former student of economics at Cambridge University. He says the best way of doing this is to ensure you work on different desks during the internship. "I started in pan-European equity sales, and then moved to sit with the sales traders, the research guys and the people who ran hedge fund services." This strategy offers the additional advantage of building a broad network of contacts across the bank, one of whom may be in a position to offer you a full time job.

Learn from people around you. It's no good spending the internship in a bubble. Most of what you learn will come from conversations with the people around you. "At the end of the internship you'll be tested on what you've learned during the ten weeks," warns Deutsche Bank's Satheesh. "You might think you know the answers just because you've read a particular book or mastered a particular model, but there's no substitute for the kind of knowledge that comes from talking to people with experience of actually doing the job." The head of graduate recruitment at one European bank says it will help to make a note of what you're told: "It may seem anal, but it's worth it," she says.

Find people you like ...and then cultivate the relationship. "Look for people that have the same way of thinking as you," advises a former derivatives trader with Morgan Stanley who studied finance and management at HEC in France. "Do your best to build relationships. Make friends with the people you're working with during the internship, and then keep in touch: if you move onto another desk, send them an email or call to find out what's going on."

Be persistent. "I had to put together a report for the weekly bulletin" says Ingrid Hammond, a former maths student at Cambridge University who interned two years ago with BNP Paribas. "I sent out an email to all the regional teams asking for them to send in what they had been working on, but very few of them immediately came back to me," she recalls. "In that situation you need the confidence to go up to the desks and ask for people to help, rather than just sitting in your seat and hoping for the best."

Be enthusiastic. "It's all about attitude," says the graduate recruiter. "A lot of what you will be doing is not rocket science. What will distinguish you is a can-do approach and a willingness to make that extra effort." It's no good thinking that just because you're a student from a top university, you're above fetching the coffees, she warns. Wherever you work, she says you could even turn the coffee-run to your advantage. "Its called currencies of exchange – you might want to offer to fetch the coffees in return for a chat about what happened with a particular trade that morning."

Take the initiative. "During the internship, you'll have a lot of freedom to find something you're interested in and then work on it," says Olanrewaju Fatimilehin, a debt capital markets banker at Goldman Sachs and former student of chemical engineering at Imperial College London. "I was interested in structured finance, so asked if I could help in that area. I then worked on an investor presentation for a deal the structured finance team was closing at the time."