Just a disclaimer, getting a shortlist or an internship is very random, and it does not define you or your future. After all, it is just an intern. Now you can start reading the blog :)
My name is Raghav Gupta, and I am a fourth year undergraduate in the Department of Chemical Engineering. I did my summer internship in Faering Capital, a Private Equity firm.
Internship Season Starts!
The start of intern season hit me with the opening of IAFs; I remember the night when I panicked and filled all of the IAFs open for me. Be it Microsoft, Jane Street, or HUL - I signed everything. Then came the shortlists. The scariest part of the intern season is the shortlist phase. Trust me, InstiApp breaks more hearts than Salsa Night proposals. After every shortlist, you hear people shouting “iska hogya”, “iska bhi hogya” and the classic “iska kaise hogya?”.
I will summarise my selection procedure for you. I sat through the interviews of 5 companies, out of which 4 were Day 1 companies. Sounds nice so far, right? Well, I did not get and Day 1 interns, although I went to the last interview round of each one. In Optiver, 5 students including me went to Round 3 of interviews, and 4 got an intern. Then, Bain took 11 people in Round 2 (yes, I was in that too) and selected 8 people, something similar happened with DB and Jane Street. I was always the unlucky person in interview selection, even though I always felt my interviews went well. Frankly, this was not a pleasant experience. Multiple rejections, day after day, will take a heavy toll on you and your confidence .
Then, came Faering for the internship. During my interviews at Faering I was pretty nonchalant, having no hope for an internship after Day 1, but guess what? After one test and two rounds of interviews, I made it through and got selected! :)
Internship
My internship started on May 15th. The first week was like a training phase where we had to do some introductory accounting courses and learn how Faering analysed companies. After week 1, the real work began, so the good thing about Faering was that it just had 11 employees; thus the work exposure I got during my internship was really good. I worked directly under the director of the firm in the consumer sector. From week 2 Faering started treating us as full-time employees by giving us proper deals to analyse.
Work
So Faering is a private equity firm, and my work was to analyse companies that needed funding. I will try to explain with an example, take a company which needs money (let’s say 100 crores) to grow and expand in the next 5 years, so what this company will do is ask Faering for this money in return Faering will take a part of the company. Once they approach Faering, they will share their financials, historical sales data, next 5 yr plan, etc., for us to analyse whether the investment will be profitable. Now here is where my work used to come in. Hence, I used to get a company and all their information every week. I was supposed to analyse this company based on industry size, business model, competitive positioning, and valuation. After this, I used to summarise my findings in a PPT(Non-core people love PPTs) with some recommendations after discussing with my supervisor, and the decision to invest used to go to the Investing Committee(founders of the firm). This happened every week with a different company and a different business. The work, in general, was fun and exciting and it never got boring as you got to study new companies. The office was very nice we had a sea view, there were some pretty good snacks available for us at all times, the only con of the internship I would say is that we had to go to office everyday from 9AM to 9PM and the office was in Worli so travelling part was a bit tough.
Ending Words
In general, don’t stress about internships, and don’t put all your focus on just one company or one industry. Be open-minded, try to avoid the peer pressure and FOMO of internships. It will be tough, but meh, in the end, it is just a stupid undergraduate internship.