More Q&A

I like when you ask questions! Here are a few more:

"How many non-native speakers are there in your department? Which kind of expectations lie upon them, in comparison to the other interns?"

In my group there are quite a few non=native speakers. I work closely with a guy from Quebec whose native language is French. There are quite a few people in my group who are from South America and either speak Portuguese or Spanish. I also work with three people whose native language is Russian. So I have a pretty diverse group. I think that actually they have the same expectations that all of us do to perform and to get work done. They are expected to be able to read/write just like the rest of us. It's not like we have to produce huge documents or anything, but you need to be able to describe things in bullet point form and put your ideas onto a slide.

For Cally, you can email me at lifeofasummerintern@gmail.com, or just post your questions in the comments and I'll respond.

Lastly:
"I'm curious whether having a finance background is directly advantageous for performing well during the internship/full time."

Having a finance background is by no means necessary for the job. Probably more than half the people I work with don't have a finance background. BUT, having a finance background is of course directly advantageous in this job, because that's what you're doing. I feel like I am ahead of a lot of the other interns because I know a lot about finance and I don't get lost when we start talking about deferred taxes and merger arbitrage.

I've taken two introductory accounting classes and a financial accounting class, two financial management classes, an investments class, an asset management class, and a class about investment banking. I've also taken an econ class and a few other business-related classes. I think that the more accounting classes you can take (not tax accounting, but more like corporate finance-related stuff) the better for this job, since all you do is deal with financial statements.