How to Make the Most of a Summer Internship: How to Differentiate Yourself as an Intern

This article is sponsored by Goldman Sachs.

What does it take to stand out from the crowd during an internship? As former Goldman Sachs interns, Serrena and Jeremy know all about that! A 2012 Yale graduate, Serrena majored in applied math and had four internships (three of them at Goldman Sachs!) before landing a full-time job with the company. She currently works in equity trading in the Securities division. A former economics major who graduated from the University of Michigan, Jeremy interned at Goldman Sachs the summer after his junior year. He currently holds a position in Operations.

In the second part of this three-part series, Serrena and Jeremy offer advice on how to differentiate yourself as an intern.

How can an intern positively differentiate themselves from other fellow interns?

Jeremy: It’s important to be proactive and to be positive. Obviously you want to raise your hand and try to get involved in as many things as possible, but at the same time the members of the team who are there full time are really busy and sometimes they might not be able to answer you or help you right away. Never think that you’re the invisible intern if someone can’t respond to you right away. Your conduct always reflects upon you and your team so you want to be positive but also maintain the right balance.

Serrena: One other thing I would say is that in a finance internship, you might come in with a lot of experience working at a bank or with a finance major, or maybe you’ll come in with a liberal arts major and you’ve never even worked in business. If you come from the former category, be humble about it. If you come from the latter, don’t count yourself out. Everyone is there for a reason and once you get to the internship, everything is fair game.

How can an intern add value to their team and the organization at large?

Jeremy: I think it’s really important to try to add value however you possibly can as an intern, even if it’s in a roundabout way. During my internship, my team of six interns worked on a new client coverage model. We did a cost-benefit analysis and assessed the potential risks of transitioning our client coverage model to a new structure. The second thing that added value was that I used my computer programming background and wrote some Excel macros which helped team members save time each day. They’re still used today, so over the course of four or five years, they made a big difference for the team.

Serrena: I was proud of being able to take my academic background and my personal interests and connect them to what I was learning as an intern. As an applied math major, I learned some coding and logical reasoning. Then as an intern, I learned how traders think about the market. I was able to do some backtesting and analysis for the company. That’s definitely something we’re going to be looking for when interns come this summer — people who can take their unique and diverse backgrounds and connect them to what we’re doing on a day-to-day basis.

To learn more about current Goldman Sachs internship opportunities, explore the full list of positions on WayUp.

For more advice from Serrena and Jeremy, check out “Preparing for Your First Day” and “How to Handle Feedback.”