Answering a few questions...

One of you asked about Excel 2003 vs. 2007. To my knowledge nobody on the Street uses 2007 at all. It would really screw things up around here if we suddenly changed to 2007. Lots of the firms have Excel add-ins that are proprietary to the firms that work through 2003. For example, our firm has lots of custom shortcuts so that you can set cell formats in specific ways with one shortcut. It saves a lot of time and is pretty helpful. I don't think that the banks will be shifting to Excel 2007 any time soon.

As far as things that I wish I would have done more/less of to prepare for the internship, here are some thoughts:

MORE:
I wish that I would have done even more in Excel to learn the shortcuts and just be comfortable working in it. I actually did a lot of work and knew most of the shortcuts that we use here, which has been REALLY helpful and has set me apart from some of the other interns. But you can always do more to prepare. It's just good to know how to do things like group/ungroup columns and rows, navigate around cells/sheets/workbooks, and especially how to audit cells (things like F2, Alt [, Alt TUT, etc).

As far as learning finance and accounting, that's another thing you could never get enough of. They don't expect interns to know anything, but the more you know the easier your life is. If you know how to calculate EBITDA or find the diluted shares outstanding, you'll be able to just bust it out instead of asking an analyst how to do it. Then when they see that you know how to do it, they give you better stuff to work on. The Vault Guide is a good start, but it's only a start. Learn as much finance and accounting as you can and you won't be sorry.

Exercise! Since you work all the time out here, it's pretty hard to get time to go running or work out, so take advantage of that all you can before you come out. Seamless web is great but it's not good for the waistline to eat a $25 meal every night.

LESS:
PowerPoint. Basically everything I do in PowerPoint (which is a lot) is automated by the Firm's software. It wouldn't really help to become a whiz in PPT because you don't have to build the slides yourself anyway. You just do the calcs in Excel, then import it into PPT and use the Firmware to gin it up and make it look nice.

Financial Modeling. I have to be careful here because it is very important to know how a model works and what is behind it, but I'm talking about paying a ton of money to learn to build a simple DCF. It seemed like a really important thing to do before I came out here to learn how to build a DCF model. It's just funny now thinking back to that because you don't really get to just build a model from scratch as an intern unless you're just practicing. If you do work on a model, some analyst or associate has already been working on it for a while and just needs you to work on a specific part of it. I guess I can say that any experience working with financials, looking up 10-Ks and Qs, and then putting it into Excel is good practice. The models out here are way more complex than the ones I built at school, but I guess it was good practice.


Let me know if you have any other specific questions about the internship or life in NYC.