Banking internships: A complete guide to summer analyst programs

Investment banks recruit their graduates from the 10 week+ summer internships they offer to penultimate-year students. In the UK at least, these students are often already prepped and groomed through a spring internship in the first year of their studies.

This internship pipeline gives banks a steady stream of fresh talent that they've had a chance to test in the workplace. As a candidate, once you’re in the internship pipeline, you’ve got a great chance to stay in it.  At least half of students who complete summer internships usually get return offers. The hardest part is getting an internship in the first place. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, which run some of the largest intern classes in the industry, have acceptance rates of around 0.7% each.

Getting a summer internship – and understanding the machinery and logic behind them, as well as how to excel on yours – are therefore critical if you are aiming for a career in an investment bank, particularly if you want to be a banker or a trader. All roles in banks offer internships though, including in areas like technology, risk and compliance.

What are investment banking summer internships exactly?

Summer internships in banks are eight- to 12- week long programs, with some variation in the exact length depending on bank and program. There are two main types of summer internships: summer analyst programs, for penultimate-year undergraduates, and summer associate programs, for MBA students. In the investment banking hierarchy, associates are a step above analysts, reflecting the fact that MBA students typically have a few years of experience under their belts.

There are also off-cycle internships, typically for last-year undergraduate students who missed out on summer internships. Off-cycle internships can last anywhere from 3 to 12 months and are available in a wide variety of locations and business areas.

Banks usually offer internships across all their divisions. In the front office of an investment bank, this includes global markets, which comprises sales and trading (and research), as well as corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, and capital markets. Internships are also available across everything from risk and quantitative finance to operations and compliance.

As well as summer internships and off-cycle internships, banks offer spring internships. These are week long events for first-year students and run during the Easter break. Spring internships are short introductions to banking, but they're increasingly important. Some banks recruit summer interns from them. They're common in Europe – but they’re starting to be phased out in America, where they were a lynchpin in how banks organized their diversity hiring.

Spring internships can be very useful for your application. Data from Trackr (formerly the Bristol Trackr) suggested in April that students with spring internships under their belt had to make just 73 applications on average for a successful summer internship acceptance, compared to 138 on average for students without previous spring internships.

What are my chances of getting in?

As we noted above, at Goldman Sachs, the acceptance rate of interns declined from 1.27% in 2022 to 0.72% in 2025. Why? Because while the number of open internship places increased from 3,000 to 3,600 in that period, the number of people applying to them increased from 236k to around 359k.

The change was even more stark in other places. JPMorgan had 505k applicants to 4,500 internships in 2024; the next year, it had 630k applicants to just 4,100 internships.

In all likelihood, things will get even worse in the future. Two years ago, there were whispers that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley would cut their summer internship cohorts by two-thirds to accommodate the increased productivity offered by AI-powered bankers. That hasn’t come to pass, but class sizes are shrinking, and AI adoption is rising.

It also matters where and what you study. Although banks are increasingly interested in hiring from a wide group of universities, it still helps to be at a university with a history of placing people into banking, so that it can coach you on how to handle the internship. "It really helps for them to have a conversation with people who went through the application process and had their first steps in the job previously. It also helps them to understand more about the bank, the culture, the teams,” said an HEC professor who previously worked for Barclays.

Trackrr, formerly the Bristol Tracker, said in a report in April that the average student who received an internship offer in the UK in 2026 applied to over 100 programs, up from 68 in 2024 and 75 in 2025. The figures were slightly better for diverse students, including women, who applied to just 79 programs on average, and black people who applied to less than 50 programs on average.

What can I expect from a banking internship?

Different banks structure their internships in different ways. Internships are also typically structured differently depending upon the area of the bank you're working in.

Summer internships typically start with one week of online and classroom training followed by hands-on work experience with a particular “desk”, or team. In some banks (such as Goldman Sachs), sales & trading internships will offer a “rotation”, where you work on different desks to gain broader experience and see which of the teams you best mesh with.

Generally speaking, interns do the same things that analysts do, but on a smaller scale. In a 2024 video, former JPMorgan analyst Cameron Galbraith said that an intern would be handed “a few slides” of a large deck to work on and to received feedback on. Galbraith did say, however, that you should do more of the deck as a learning exercise, and to be useful to your team.          

Galbraith also suggests asking “thoughtful” questions to your analyst, and to “impress” them by suggesting ideas – even if 99% of the time they will definitely not be used. But merely showing bigger picture thinking will do a lot to impress.

Kunal Shah, Co-CEO of Goldman Sachs International (the firm’s UK branch) and its global co-head of fixed income, currencies, and commodities, said recently that his 10 week internship at the firm was where he could “really get tested out”, in situations where his supervisors could see not just what he knew, but how he reacted to new bits of information.

Aside from what’s traditionally important, interns in today’s day and age are expected to have extreme AI fluency. Fabian Figi, the head of campus recruiting at market making firm Citadel Securities, told Business Insider in May that the firm’s "AI native" interns would take on more "meaningful responsibility very early on, including work focused on applying AI to complex real-world problems."

Shah said today's interns can make themselves valuable by displaying their technological prowess.  “Junior talent are inherently tech-savvy, and they don't have the legacy of why we do things in a certain way. They can see how to disrupt us,” he said. Shah also told students not to fear the risk of AI killing the job you're moving into. When he did his internship in 2003, he was told not to rotate onto the fixed income desk as an intern due to pending automation. In fact, he said automation simply meant that he did not have to collect physical trade tickets or book travel or type so many things into spreadsheets.

For the AI-powered interns of the future, this means automated building of spreadsheet models and standardizing PowerPoint formats. The job became more interesting without spending time booking travel – and the hope is that it can become more interesting without fixing pitchbooks.

Will I get paid for the internship?

Yes. Interns in investment banks are paid the same as full time junior analysts (although without the bonuses) and intern salaries are pro-rated for the length of the internship.

You can therefore expect to earn around $20k (£15k) from a summer analyst internship, but given what you could earn as a banker, the money is not as important as the experience.

For MBA students, the figures are similar. NYU’s employment report for MBA students showed that the average investment banking summer intern earned $3.3k in weekly pay, or around $26k - $30k depending on the length of the internship.

How do I apply for a banking internship?

The investment banking recruitment process is a long thing. Generally speaking, the process goes like this:

In your first year at a top university, you are a top student academically with a wide range of extracurricular pastimes, especially sports. You put together your CV expertly, and if you're in Europe you apply for spring weeks at the most prestigious investment banks. They like your CV, they offer you an interview, you ace the interview, and then they offer you a spring week. You can do multiple spring weeks, if you have the time or inclination. It’s not unheard of to complete as many as nine.

Some banks offer summer internships to spring interns during the spring internship. If you weren’t offered one, whether through your own failure or because the bank didn’t offer them, you’ll want to start applying to summer internships manually.

These can open really, really early, depending on where you are in the world (US opens earlier than EMEA – more on that here). You’ll want to get your application in as soon as you can - there are limited places, and programs close when they are filled in many locations.

If banks like your resume, you can expect a barrage of digital interviews and online tests, such as HireVue or HackerRank tests, which banks use to screen applicants before interviewing in person, usually at a “super day” with multiple interviews. If you’re successful, you can expect an internship offers shortly after.

Brian Landeros, a former Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs intern (as well as an analyst at boutique bank Evercore) says that the key is good timing and "an immense level of grit". Research is the key to both: "I literally came across all these resources online telling me how to network," says Landeros. "I started reaching out to alumni. There was all this stuff that I realised I needed to do." Networking and performing well on the internship are both important, but the critical factor is getting the internship to begin with. "The door opens up for one semester, and then it closes forever," Landeros warns.

How do I turn my internship into an analyst job?

This is also called “converting” your internship.

The usual answers for converting an internship are to work as hard as you can, network like crazy, and try to fit into the firm’s culture. Get the coffee often and generally speaking be as helpful as you can.

One M&A MD told us that banks value “proactive” employees and expect you to be both ask questions and to be intellectually curious. Other roles might expect you to solve issues by yourself, but banks value you more for doing something right, rather than necessarily independently.

“My mentor told me four tricks that turned the situation around,” the MD also told us. “Firstly, she said that every time I completed an assignment, I needed to ask for feedback right away. Secondly, she said that every time I completed a project, I needed to ask for informal feedback. Thirdly, she said I needed to arrange coffee chats with associates, directors and MDs in my team and adjacent teams to get to know people and learn about their roles. And fourthly, she said I needed to make it very clear to everyone that I was really enjoying my time with the bank.”

Don’t complain about the hours. Banks say they are keen to encourage a better work-life balance, but you’re still expected to answer a request for help at 7pm, even if you were planning to meet friends. Interns work shorter hours than analysts, but not a traditional 9-5. If you can’t stand intern hours, then analyst hours will drive you mad, and banking probably isn’t for you.

In an extensive X/Twitter post/tweet in May, finance influencer HighYieldHarry detailed his advice for students who wanted to maximise their internships. Some of the advice is very curious: Harry recommends overcommunicating by saying “will do”, “sounds good”, and “on it” when given an instruction to demonstrate that they have been recognized.

His other advice includes not asking questions that have already been answered in an email, CIM, PowerPoint, or otherwise. “Any question you have should be an expansion or clarification point NOT something already clearly stated,” HighYieldHarry said.

He also recommends not taking a vacation during your internship. “You are trying out for a sports team – you haven’t made the team yet, but you’re getting the chance to make the big leagues. Would you leave the team in the middle of preseason before the roster is finalized?”

What happens if I don’t get a job offer after my internship?

You might have an issue. Banks are extremely reliant on internship programs and actively seek to recruit people from them. Not being hired by the bank you interned for is not only a bad situation to be in in the moment, but could also potentially be a red flag to other prospective employers.

For one, you can apply directly to graduate analyst programs. This is what banks put analysts through when they are recruited. These are two-year programs, and at many banks you can apply to them “normally”. This is your first port of call.

Your second is an off-cycle internship. These are also for graduates and are generally longer (three to six months, sometimes up to 12) than summer internships, but not multi-year in length. Doing an off-cycle internship abroad, especially in Europe, can be a good “resetting” of your career. Off-cycle internships can sometimes be better than summer internships, as they offer you broader work experience opportunities.

It's also worth noting that you can still apply for internships even as you go into your final year at university. It's becoming increasingly common for students to complete internships during the summer after they graduate – although it might not be possible in investment banking, where your graduation date is part of the requirements.

How do you get around that? By doing a top-quality master’s degree, of course. It doesn’t put you in a better position to do one, but it does give you another shot at a career in banking. All it costs you is five figures (potentially six, in the USA) of debt. Hey, don’t look at us – you should have secured and converted your second-year summer internship to begin with.

The quality of a master’s in finance degree is also worth considering. While a top masters from a top university - such as St. Gallen or HEC - can effectively give you an extra year in which to "lock in" and get the job you've been praying for, others "will charge you $100k and leave you to rot," we were told by former careers coach Mark Ross.

If you're in the US, Brian Landeros also thinks that delaying your graduation can be worth it. "There are candidates who get to the second year of college and who had no idea what banking was but are suddenly interested in the industry," Landeros says. He suggests delaying your graduation date as much as possible and applying like crazy to the internships that you are still eligible for. Internships are really, really important.