Wall Street internship season is fast approaching, which means thousands of aspiring financiers will soon be mulling the question: How do I end the summer with a full-time offer in hand?
Besides the obvious tactics of working hard, impressing your superiors, and showing passion for the job, there’s no roadmap for landing a spot — meaning how to leave the internship as one of the chosen ones isn’t always clear. But at the $20 billion Chicago-based hedge fund Balyasny Asset Management — which employees internally refer to colloquially as “BAM” — there’s one factor that matters most: feedback.
“We put a premium on transparency,” said Hannah Dinardo, head of campus recruiting at BAM. “Our teams are not shy to give direct feedback on the desk. So you know where you stand as an intern.”
How employees seek out, receive, and turn feedback into action is a huge part of the firm’s MO, she told Business Insider in an interview. That goes for summer interns, too, and may be especially important for them considering the bar to entry is high at Balyasny. The firm said it usually converts about 50% of its top-performing summer interns into full-time hires. (That’s significantly more competitive than internships at places like investment banks, where giving out job offers to 90% of interns in a given class is not unusual.)
“Our conversions are very strategic and intentional,” Dinardo said of the offer rate. “The campus program is really a direct reflection of the scalability and growth of the broader firm and different groups within the firm.”
BAM hires interns across front-office investment teams, like in macro commodities and systematic strategies, as well as business-side teams like tech, data, risk and portfolio construction. Though most interns are based in New York, they are also spread out across the US — Chicago, Austin, Houston, San Francisco — and internationally in London, Hong Kong, and Singapore. This summer, the firm is expecting to host about 100 interns, which equals about a 0.5% acceptance rate considering it received over 40,000 applications.
We spoke to execs at the firm, including Dinardo and a head of business development, as well as a former intern-turned-new-hire about why feedback matters so much and how to use it to one’s advantage during an internship at Balyasny. The advice, while specific to these professionals’ firms and experiences, is applicable to anyone getting started in the competitive field of finance with a desire to stand out.
Embrace imperfection and failure first
After a week or two of training and intros, depending on the team, summer interns at Balyasny hit the ground running by immediately getting involved in the work of their team, said Dinardo. Despite the trial-by-fire format, interns aren’t expected to have all the answers.
“You’re not going to jump in with perfection right away,” she said. “It is a totally new environment, it’s super challenging. So it’s really how you’re able to adapt to that.”
Andrew McHugh, the cohead of business development for US equities and commodities, has been at BAM for a decade. When he started as an intern in 2014, he was a political science major with little knowledge of the business. Making some mistakes in the beginning is part of the learning process, he added.
“I opened myself up to failure, and BAM is set up so that getting the wrong answer is not necessarily failure — failure is not trying,” he told BI.
To that end, interns should avoid coming into the summer too sure of themselves.
“Don’t try to run before you walk,” he said. “Appreciate that this is a new world. The way that people approach problems is different, so that’s going to be a learning curve. If someone comes in and they don’t want to change the way they think, that’s going to be really difficult.”
Seek out ample feedback to learn and show initiative
When Anna Gietl was an intern on the equity portfolio management systems (EPMS) team in the summer of 2022, she did a project that explored the creation of a platform to enable real-time data retrieval, she told BI. It was one of her most formative experiences.
In addition to a daily team meeting where she heard about other interns’ “proof of concept” projects, Gietl also met with her direct manager daily to get feedback on her project and ensure she was on the right track.
“My manager — who was already incredibly busy — took the time every day to meet with me for half an hour, at least, to keep me on the right track,” she said. “I could have been going down the completely wrong track for days if I didn’t have this guidance and mentorship. The right mentorship gave me the opportunity to help create something material for the company, which was an invaluable experience.”
The hedge fund also has a formal feedback process where interns get a progress report about halfway through the summer, and again at the end. But Gietl advises incoming interns to do what she did — seek out feedback much more often, because it shows initiative and that you want to learn quickly.
“One of the best pieces of advice I’ve gotten from someone who I asked for mentorship from was that you finally start learning once you come to terms with the fact that you really don’t know anything,” she said. “It’s something I reflect on often, and I think it’s important to try to keep yourself humble and just know that you have so much to learn. Take advantage of all the resources around you.”
Don’t just hear feedback — implement it
Balyasny’s culture is about more than accepting feedback or seeking it out. It’s also important to use it to grow, McHugh said.
“Make sure that you’re implementing that feedback quickly, learning, and not making the same mistake twice,” he said.
McHugh said humility and intellectual curiosity are the top qualities he looks for in new hires.
“Everyone’s smart. Most people are going to work really hard, those are kind of table stakes,” he said. “Humility so that you can accept feedback and then implement it and improve. And then intellectual curiosity so you can come up with some of these efficiencies and issues and actually make the business better because you’re interested in improving it.”
Feedback can also be a catalyst to help build connections and solicit mentorship from people outside your team, Gietl added.
“One of the biggest things that I kept in mind throughout the internship is really focusing on getting up from my desk and making connections across the firm, really taking the initiative to seek out people who can provide you with mentorship and advice.”
For Gietl, the continuous guidance she sought paid off when it came to her proof-of-concept project. She presented it to a group of the firm’s equities technology senior executives at the end of the summer and left the firm with a return offer to join BAM’s “tech academy,” a yearlong rotational program where new hires get to work on four different teams at the firm.
When she returned a year later to onboard full time in June 2023, she learned that her proposal had been implemented at the firm.
“My manager from my internship approached me and showed me what my project as an intern had come to life as, which was really cool,” she said. “It helped give me confidence in knowing that I could do these things and I was capable of contributing and being a really active member here. So, coming into this year, I’ve been able to do a lot of other projects that have now been implemented throughout the firm.”
Read the full article here
