Company Profiles

Monday 8:00 a.m - 4:45 a.m
Tuesday 9:30 a.m. - 11:30 p.m.

Busy Busy Busy. And boy do I have stories. Its kind of interesting...if you follow The Analyst's blog like I do, we are going through the same stuff at the same time and yet he is about to end his internship and I am just getting into mine. Even down to the type of people we are working with.

I got staffed on doing company profiles with an analyst who has been kickin' my trash. I even got the "You need to step it up" comment from him. Let me tell you the situation. And how things were handled.

We had this assignment to do 3 company profiles last tueday due this past monday...you know so 6 days. I told the analyst that I was staffed with, "Hey I am willing to come in on Independence Day and Saturday to get this done. I have no plans." Well I mentioned that to him a couple time and he didn't really push to get it done.

Then on Monday I was sitting in training and I get an email from the VP who is in charge of this, "When can I see your guys' profiles?" Two seconds later the analyst sends me an email, "I need you to leave training NOW we have 1 hour to get this to him."

So I leave and we get to cranking on them. The analyst isn't happy because he got caught no paying attention to deadlines, I am a little frustrated because I knew what was coming and didn't have any guidence on where to go.

So the VP took off Monday night and me and this analyst spent the entire night going over and over the profiles. Now, call it a weakness, but I move slow. What an analyst can do in 15 minutes takes me an hour. I don't know where to find things, like as far as research, nor do I know what kind of things to look out for.

Additionally I am staffed on live deals, and not only is this thing I am doing not live, the big picture is not even banking related. I got the "step it up call" when I had to compose some information and I wasn't finished by the time we met up again. He said, "I gave you all day to do it.."When he really only gave me an hour and 1/2.

For those of you who know me well, know that I love to argue. In this particular case, and something I am very cautious about in this internship is not arguing even though they might be wrong, just don't do it. I held my peace through ALL of his comments. It was a little discouraging to work with him because I felt like all this effort I was putting in was not only worthless, but costing him extra work. Like the net effect of me being there was a loss.

But this is what I love. He broke me down. What I mean by that is he definitely caught my laziness and pointed it out. For example, there wer numbers that I would pull and question, but then say to myself, "Well I don't where to really look for this, so I will use this unreliable resource..." And then we would get together and he would ask, "Where did you get this...oh, thats lazy." It pissed me off. So over the course of working 40 hours in 2 days, I think my level of detail has picked up, but I am no where near trustworthy, that is the analysts will always triple check my numbers.

Let me cover 2 more things

(1) One of the things I love about this office it the exposure to MDs. I have had a couple meetings with MDs. I had a really cool phone conference yesterday. It was the MD who was driving somewhere, another MD, the CEO and CFO of a public company, an analyst and an associate and myself. What was going down? This company is in trouble and want the bank to advise. The phone call was to get the go ahead to present to the board as well as talk about fees, So here I am listening to these MDs negotiate. Boy do they have to be salespeople! The CEO and CFO were giving them grief and the MDs were standing their ground. I think what is really cool is the fact that I, little old intern, have enough non-public material information that if I traded on it I could go to jail! I mean I know things that if investors knew would manipulate the markets.

(2) The Banking Gods do they smile upon you? For some reason when it gets late at night Excel and PowerPoint do weird things. Sometimes its good, sometimes its bad. For example, I was working on something that printed out with huge font sizes, yet when I looked at the screen, they were normal and when I looked in print preview they were normal. I asked an analyst and it took him a bit, he didn't diagnose what was wrong, he just fixed the problem. At the same time I have had some things that, honestly, I don't think should have worked. Under the circumstances I got thinking and said, "I don't think what I just did should have returned that good of a result but SWEET!"