Leavey Ambassadors Program Blogs

Each year, companies are pushing their recruiting cycles earlier and earlier. The fight for competition forces these companies to move their recruiting timelines and, in turn, has affected candidates. Students are expected to know what they want to do in their careers so early on and are not given the opportunity to explore their options. I was lucky to discover investment banking during the summer after freshman year. This gave me an idea of what a potential future career could look like, but even then, the recruiting timelines came at me like a bullet. 

I started recruiting for my Summer 2023 internship in the spring of my sophomore year. In other words, I had to begin recruiting before I even started my sophomore summer internship. I had no idea if I would like what I would do over the summer or not, yet I had to begin prepping for the following summer if I wanted to remain competitive. During this cycle, I had the opportunity to interview with top firms like Goldman Sachs, Evercore, Vista Equity, and Centerview, among others. It was a long, tedious, and competitive process but it taught me many lessons along the way. 

As soon as the school year wrapped up, I started my internship with KPMG within their Deal Advisory practice. I not only got the opportunity to make many great connections but also to develop many technical skills. I worked a lot with excel and tableau and different information systems to complete pro forma adjustments. Additionally, I got the opportunity to be on the closing end of a $4 billion sell-side deal in which we were advising a private equity firm to sell 50% of its stake in a utility company. It was a great experience and convinced me to head into the private equity sector. All summer and spring, I had been recruiting for investment banking, but as an opportunity arose in private equity, I had to seize the opportunity. The interview prep was very similar, and my preparation for investment banking had prepared me well for private equity interviews. 

Overall it was a very insightful recruiting process. I discovered many new companies and made many great connections along the way. To that, I tell students: Use your network wisely and explore what you like early on so that you will be prepared when recruiting comes around. 

I’m also proud to say that next summer, I will intern at Vista Equity Partners as a Private Equity Summer Analyst.