what's up everyone it's kenji here and in this video i'll go over all of my internships
explaining why i did them and what i learned from them so let's get into it and thank you to
trends for sponsoring this video so here's the four years i had available in my university's
business program and i knew that the last two were going to be the most important internship wise
as they were closest to graduation for the first two i had i had two main goals firstly to try to
build up my resume and have something attractive for the third and the fourth year and secondly to
try and experiment and see what i liked most starting off with my very first internship
and that was in the summer between my first and my second year of university because i was very young
my resume looked pretty empty to be honest the only experience i had was working at a packaging
company the summer prior so let's just say i wasn't a very attractive candidate among the
few skills that i had was that i spoke languages so i put them to good use by working at a hotel
where there were guests from around the world specifically i worked as a bellman at emery hotel
although at face value you might just think i was picking up luggage and that was indeed the
case my process was that if i could tie this to a more corporate role where i wanted to get into
in the future it would do well for my resume so i pitched this as something where i worked as a team
i improved my interpersonal communication as i was talking with the guests all the time
and i provided good customer service as it was a five-star hotel after all
all of these skills i felt were applicable to any office role whether you're working as a banker
a consultant or a lawyer at the end of day you work as part of a team
you try to communicate things clearly and you want to provide value to the customer so i knew that as
a first internship where i really couldn't get too picky it was going to be a good foundation
by the time i was back in university for my second year i wanted to get a corporate internship
so i went in an office basically and that's when i found out about insight weeks which were one
to two week long pre-internship programs that would then fast-track you to a summer
internship the following year by fast track i mean that you could receive an internship offer
way before the application portal was even open to the general public just because
you had impressed in the insight program in these programs you learn about the company
you get to shadow a few employees and you have a final project or two that you need to present
here's jp morgan's description of theirs for example it says it's three days and at the bottom
you can see that participants may be fast-tracked for interviews for our summer internships
so with this new discovery i began applying to a ton of them but i was actually rejected by
pretty much all this triggered me to start contemplating transferring universities so
i'd have a more competitive resume but more on that later i did get one lucky break though at
bloomberg they decided to interview me so i had two different interviews one of which had to do
with a language test of which well the language skills came handy once again and so i managed
to secure an inside program at bloomberg this was my first office experience and even though
it was just one week for a 19 year old me this was pretty awesome there i learned about the
financial markets the different market players and i got to use the famous bloomberg terminal
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the link in the description below alright back to the video around the spring of year two came the
big news i was accepted to cornell university as a transfer and i was pretty stoked about it i knew
that moving to the states was gonna be quite a big shift but it was only for the last two
years and i felt like getting an ivy league degree could open up quite a few more doors for me now my
resume was slightly more attractive with cornell's education and merier and bloomberg as experience
so with the updated resume i got to work at pwc in the summer between my second and my third year
as a financial audit intern and i was really happy with this i was finally getting to apply
some of my university courses into my internship my days consisted of using excel and accounting to
make sure the financial statements of our clients were accurate i got to work in the client's
office as it's usually the case in financial audit so as a 20 year old me it was quite
interesting to get to see offices in different industries and what their work they look like
in my case i was lucky enough to get to audit a car manufacturer as well as a real estate fund
looking towards my third year i knew that having a big four on my resume would be a good boost
then between my third and fourth year of university i got the internship that most of you
probably know me from which is a goldman sachs as an investment banking summer analyst in new york
and again my language skills came handy here as well although my team was based in new york
because a lot of the work was actually in latin america in my case i spoke spanish fluently so
that was a big edge over other candidates that maybe didn't speak spanish or portuguese as for
what i did there well you can check out my day in the life video where i talk about it in more
detail but in short a lot of powerpoint and excel things like creating decks to send to clients
updating financial models or conducting market research around this time i realized that i wanted
to go back to europe after graduation so i decided against staying in new york or the us in general
and began looking for options closer to home as i went back to university for my final year after
a few months the pandemic hit and i was sent back home earlier than i expected there i did one last
internship at a tech startup in the delivery space called globo which is somewhat similar in the us
equivalence to doordash or ubereats specifically i was in their financial planning and analysis team
and as for why i did it well i was gonna go into a corporate role on a full-time basis after that
so i felt like it'd be nice to try out a tech startup and see what that's like and maybe even
consider if that's something that i want to do further down the line from what i saw everything
was much more up in the air if i wanted to change or improve something i didn't have to go through
compliance and get it approved instead i just had to ask my manager and if i got the yes then
i could go ahead and do it also i was given a lot more responsibility than in previous roles
i ran a few different projects both in finance as well as in strategy and this time around
instead of just updating excel models i was in charge of creating them from scratch
on the downside it being a startup it obviously had a lot more uncertainty it was quite normal
to get some last minute changes or requests also given the business model you didn't quite know if
there was going to be new regulation and things like that because the app delivery space was
relatively new and at the same time because even though the company had a billion plus valuation
it wasn't quite profitable yet so that meant that fundraising was always in the back of their heads
on the whole though all of these internship experiences were very positive and i'm glad
that i put myself out there as i felt like i learned something from each one of them
also they were all paid which is appreciated especially for students the only one that wasn't
was bloomberg because it was an inside program so it's only a week long but they did cover my
costs for their actual internships they do pay there as well after all these internships i went
on to a full-time role so that's the end of the internship cycle if you want to find out more
about how i actually got the internships how i applied etc let me know in the comments if you
want a video just on that if you want to find out more about my resume check out this video over
here and if you want to find out some cover letter tips check out this other video over here that's
all for this one hit the like hit that subscribe if you liked it i'll catch you in the next one