From Freshman with a Spreadsheet to Investment Banking Intern: One Student's Path toward a Finance Career

If there is any common knowledge about going into finance among Duke undergrads, it is that recruiting began yesterday. By sophomore year, students are being recruited by the major investment banks for internships that won’t start until the summer after their junior year. This puts the onus on the youngest Duke students to explore what working in finance actually means. Luckily, among the many resources at their disposal are older peers who have been through the process and want to help.

Michael Legesse, a junior majoring in economics with a finance concentration, is one of those peers. He spoke to the Duke Financial Economics Center (DFE) about the path that brought him to a sophomore investment banking internship at Morgan Stanley last summer. Legesse also received the PIMCO Future Leaders Scholarship last year, which is designed to help Black and Hispanic/Latino/a/x students pursue a career in finance through continuing education. He will return to Morgan Stanley as an intern next summer.

DFE: When and how did your interest in finance start?

Legesse: It definitely goes back a bit. I was born to ethnically Ethiopian parents in the United Kingdom. My family won a green card lottery, and we moved to the United States when I was ten. My parents were always really serious about education. They said I could be one of three things: a doctor, an engineer, or a disappointment. I didn't want to be any of those things, so I had to figure out what else was available!

Junior year of high school when I started applying to colleges—places like Duke—I looked into what students from those schools went on to do after graduation and came across a lot who were going into finance. I had no idea what that meant and had never heard of companies like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley.

I did some research and became especially interested in investment banking. What I really liked was that at a junior level you get a ton of responsibility, more so than in other careers. It’s an apprentice-based model, where you’re learning from other people. There isn’t the notion that you need to come in knowing everything; if you’re smart and willing to work hard, they will train you. You’re surrounded by bright, driven people. It was an environment I could see myself doing well in.

DFE: Having developed an interest, how did you start pursuing finance as a career?

Legesse: I read a lot online, Wall Street Oasis, Reddit, links on DFE’s site that give you a brief introduction to the career. After exhausting those resources and getting familiar with what I could be getting into, I jumped to talking to upperclassmen. I asked them about their internship experiences, what exactly they did. They boiled it down in a way that was easily digestible. Sometimes there’s the worry when you talk to people working full-time at a firm that you might ask the wrong questions or don’t come across as polished enough, so talking to current students was a great starting point.

Once I was comfortable, I started reaching out to alumni. You have to network really broadly, so even when I didn’t have alumni to contact at a particular firm, I cold emailed people I had some type of connection with and learned about job roles that way.

DFE: Was it easy for you to reach out to alumni or did it take some confidence building?

Legesse: It definitely took confidence building. I remember my first few calls—they weren’t necessarily bad looking back now, but they seemed that way at the time. I remember sitting in my room before my first call, writing a massive list of questions and being like, “Am I going to ask this? What are they going to say?” Fortunately, the person, who was from my hometown, was super nice, which made my anxiety go down. It allowed me to build confidence for subsequent calls, and at some point, as I’m sure a lot of students who have gone through this process will say, you become a lot more comfortable just reaching out to people.

DFE: What tools did you find especially helpful in connecting with alumni?

Legesse: The Alumni Directory was really helpful. You can filter by industry, degree, program, or organizations alumni were involved with on campus. LinkedIn was a big resource for me too, for finding the names of people in current positions.

DFE: The process of getting an internship in the summer after sophomore year is less formalized than recruiting for junior summer internships. How did you navigate finding a sophomore summer internship?

Legesse: Yeah, absolutely, the sophomore process is mostly targeted toward diversity. Coming into Duke, I knew that those programs existed from what I had found out about finance in high school. I wanted to make sure I was ready, so I made a spreadsheet of every opportunity I knew existed. I didn’t have clarity on application deadlines until the spring, but for me it was big to have that list and position myself well for those opportunities. When applications opened, I applied on the first day. As we talked about earlier, I had already networked with some people, so I was on their radar.

Just like with junior internships, the recruiting for sophomore internships is super early. I applied for the Morgan Stanley internship in April of my freshman year and had my final-round interview that June.

DFE: What do you recommend to first-years who are just starting to learn about finance as a career path?

Legesse: I was more an outlier than the norm, so they should know that there is absolutely no expectation that you need a sophomore internship. No one should beat themselves up if they don’t get one.

What I would say is be open to everything. At Duke there are a ton of opportunities available. You can start with the student organizations on campus, like Consulting Club and Investment Club. Another thing is to sign up for Career Center events, firm events posted on Handshake. Firms appreciate that as a freshman you are taking the initiative to explore your options. My freshman year, I knew the dates of all the different events, and I attended not just the investment banking ones but sales and trading and consulting ones too, to get a bigger picture. They go over a day in the life of different roles and the internship application process, so it’s super helpful for someone starting out.

My final suggestion is to talk to people, starting with students who just went through the process. We’re all from the same school and want to help one another.

DFE: Talk about your experience at your Morgan Stanley internship last summer.

Legesse: The first two weeks were training, 40 hours a week. The third week I hit the desk and was told what deal I’d be working on. My deal team was a range of people, some junior people, some senior people—an analyst, an associate, a VP, and a managing director. I was working on the mergers and acquisitions team. We handled the execution processes of deals, so that’s building the financial model, doing the valuation analysis, managing a virtual data room, and managing the question lists for potential buyers of a particular company.

That was the high level, but as an intern it’s good to keep in mind that the amount that you can contribute might not be what you think because it takes a lot of time for the team to train you. Your tangible impact on a particular transaction might be that you refresh the output on some analysis that your team has run or you change some formatting on a slide. That was half of my time. The other half I did a modeling project, a simulation of what investment bankers on the M&A team do. I got to build a merger model between two companies of my choice. It was a really rewarding experience because I got to build it from scratch and have check-ins with my team. I learned to be a lot more efficient on Excel.

DFE: What types of relationships did you form through the internship?

Legesse: Everyone in my internship class got really close. Each day started at nine and ended at 11 or 12 p.m., so we spent so much time together, ate lunch and dinner together. I also got close with the analyst and associate on my deal team. They made a junior chat for us on the messaging platform, and I got comfortable asking my analyst questions. The junior people were there to comfort us if we got stressed out and make sure we understood what was going on.

DFE: How did you handle the feedback you received from your team? What would you suggest to incoming interns about receiving feedback?

Legesse: My team communicated with a staffer, a person who assigns interns to deals, who would provide me with general feedback. After hearing from the staffer, I would schedule time with my analyst to talk about how I could improve. The remainder of the summer, I tried to take initiative in the areas related to the feedback.

Your deal team is busy, so you don’t want to bother them for a lot of feedback, but take opportunities, like when you’ve delivered a project and it’s been finalized. Ask what you could have improved on. Put yourself out there and ask if there is extra work you can take on.

DFE: What did you find most challenging about the internship?

Legesse: I think it was finding the balance between getting to know the full-time people and not being too intrusive. When you’re walking by someone’s desk, you don’t want to try to strike up a conversation at the wrong time, like when they’re on the phone or working on something super important. I’d set up time to get coffee with people and have 15- to 30-minute conversations.

DFE: Do you have any other advice for students applying for internships?

Legesse: Don’t be super fixated on a particular investment bank with a certain level of deal flow. Don’t beat yourself up about not getting an internship at the top one or two banks. The work will be similar and you’ll get tremendous experience anywhere you go. Also, opportunities to move around will present themselves in the future.

DFE: Can you talk about your experience receiving the PIMCO Future Leaders Scholarship?

Legesse: It was a big scholarship cohort, 50 people, and so a big potential network with not just undergrads but PhD students and MBA students too. It was a unique mix of people from different backgrounds but also a really cohesive group.

We were invited to PIMCO’s offices in Newport Beach California for a few days. They put us in a nice hotel by the beach, and there were a lot of opportunities to mingle with the other students. The first day we could do stuff like surfing lessons or electric bike tours of the area. The second day we went to the PIMCO offices and heard the CEO of the company and others speak. We had more opportunities to mingle and learn about the company at dinner.

At some financial institutions that have scholarships like this, you have to commit to being an intern at the firm [as a scholarship recipient], but that’s not the case with PIMCO. I think it shows their initiative to help the cause [of diversity and inclusion] more broadly.

I took away a ton from the experience, and it makes we look forward to giving back one day.

DFE: Do you have any advice for minority students thinking about going into finance?

Legesse: Organizations are really starting to realize the importance of diversity and inclusion. They’re spearheading a lot of opportunities for underrepresented students to break into the industry so that in 20 years the top brass of financial institutions will more closely map the demographics of the U.S. Most banks have sophomore programs for underrepresented students. Alternative investment firms have sophomore internships too. They might not lead into a junior summer internship, but you meet a lot of people who have connections to the banks and can help you get that junior internship.

Also, avoid a fixed mindset about what you can do and be open to different opportunities. Don’t be afraid to reach out to people and ask questions, formally or informally. Talk to faculty in the DFE, other students, and student organizations.

Don’t let the notion that other students are more familiar with the industry deter you. When you get to a place like Duke, it’s an open playing field, and you have lots of opportunities to learn.