End of the Internship

For those of you who may be interns, congratulations to the end of your internship. I think most programs are finished by now (if not they're certainly finishing up).

Some comments on how the end of the internship process is/was handled.

Hopefully you will keep in touch with many/most of your fellow interns. They are the beginning of your Wall Street peer network.

If you got an offer, be careful about telling others--they may or may not have gotten theirs--but don't lie about it. I'll leave it up to you to find a clever way around that problem. Certainly don't boast about it.

Some firms tell the interns on their last day whether or not they get an offer. If you don't get the offer, that's not an invitation to leave immediately. The people you met there can still provide valuable advice and references in the future. Leaving early makes you seem like a cop-out and/or a sell-out (even if you already are a sell out by going into finance).

Collect business cards, if you hadn't already. You may want to contact these people later in your career. I had contacted people from my first internship two years later. They not only still remembered me, but they provided advice I could not have received elsewhere.

Even if you didn't get an offer, smile--you still went through a Wall Street internship, which puts you one step ahead of half the people who will be applying for a full-time job in the fall.

Go have some fun. You just made a good chunk of money in your internship. You should get your intern friends together and go out for a night. Celebrate your success!

Look forward to seeing a bunch of you around next summer.