You'll be learning sales and the basics of portfolio construction. This is far far away from getting you in the door of one of your desired careers. You def won't be learning how to pick stocks or anything like that. If they say that they are going to teach you that, then just assume that they are totally clueless in that area.

You should see if they will let you spend some time with the analysts.

Don't take a semester off for this. It will look terrible to future employers.

I can delete it if you want but theres no way you have to worry about anything you posted

this internship (aside from having the name merril lynch) will give you very little real world finance experience, unless either a) you know basically nothing about finance (in which case you're boned anyway) or b) you wanted to be on the sales desk of an ibank (which sucks.)

the best thing to do, if money isn't a concern for you, is to go through your alumni network, find people who work in either buy-side management or sell-side trading and research, and ask them for industry info on the hiring process and how they got there from your school. if the convo goes well, ask them about the possibility of shadowing them for a few months during a summer performing administrative or whatever tasks they'll give you, unpaid, just to learn.

as far as internships go tho, this one sucks. and don't worry, all of us have been there. places like merril lynch and northwestern are very good at recruiting and marketing for positions like this because they're high supply low demand for the type of people they're reaching out to.

if alumni stuff doesn't work. drop 30$ and sign up for a site like doostang. having an ivy or a top 20 will help you a ton, but the sites very niche and you'll for sure get interviews if your resume and CL are prepared correctly and you're actively seeking to educate your self and demonstrate a passion for the field.

in the meantime, while you're in school, start taking the Intro to Finance class offered by coursera.org it'll teach you stuff like time value of money, DCF models (which are the crux of money management), NPV based models, and other fundamental concepts you're not likely going to learn very well at school. do the footwork and get to understand this stuff and you'll have a big leg up on people currently interviewing at your age.

gl

Unless he wants to get into Merrill...

The analysts are buried in a deep, dark cave in NYC and spew out approved lists for the brokers to pump. Nobody is going to talk to the analysts.

Doubtful.

I did an internship there when I was in college, it was a joke. The broker I was working for didn't know squat and like the previous poster mentioned - they just pump the stocks the analysts suggest.

All I did was call and set up appointments. So telemarketing. Nobody needs an internship in how to do a $10 hr phone job.

I was worried about it at first but after finding what the guy was talking about I realized I didn't post anything bad. We can let it run.

Haha I was going to do an internship at northwestern mutual until I switched to ML... lol. That is sick I walked into two poor internships as I thought I was getting an edge since all my friends weren't doing internships or even thinking about them yet.

Thanks for the advice, I never thought of doing anything like that. The extra classes also sound like a good idea as self teaching myself is pretty hard relative to learning from someone else.

So for all the people who actually did this internship, if you could hop in a time machine to pre-ML internship, would you pass on the opportunity knowing what you know now?

Depends on what your options are. Like someone said, don't even think of taking time off for this. If this is mostly a bs sales job and you're just helping them do office stuff, then it's a waste of time.

Internships you want to learn technical things as much as possible. You want to learn hard skills you can actually put on a resume. You should be asking yourself "if i learn this, will it look good on my resume?" If it's a no, then it's a waste of time as far as internships go. Internships are to help you actually find a job.

Here's an example : we had a bunch of college interns for a few years here. They made 12 bucks an hour or some crap, came in and did all support roles, very very general, and not one person trusted any of them to do anything mildly important. At the end of their internship they did a presentation on very general points of power markets. It was all nonsense, but they thought it was pretty cool. The problem is, it was so general it didn't build their resumes at all.

We had one kid, however, stay late, offer to come in on weekends, help with actually pulling data and getting it ready for spreadsheets, etc. After a while, people realized he was pretty good and gave him a little more work to do. He was offered a job the next year (after he graduated). He also learned specific things like analyzing hourly prices in power markets in different regions, how our hedging and trading strategy was implemented, risk controls, etc. He ran with it - while also doing his internship "duties" (they were a joke).

If you could emulate that type of behavior at this place (if it's even possible), then do it. If not, I wouldn't waste my time.

Edit : I want to emphasize how important it is to do well in the beginning. You must either be a) extremely smart and capable while letting other people know this, or b) willing to go above and beyond what is asked. This can't be stressed enough when you are first starting out in your career. You'll never get a shot to be promoted if you don't impress people. You may not realize this, but there ARE meetings with multiple managers when promotions are considered, and the question "So, what do you guys think of X" will absolutely come up. You want that question to be answered in a positive manner. Work hard early, then you can relax later.