Only In New York: How Getting a Wall Street Internship Became a Cottage Industry

 On a recent Saturday afternoon, two college juniors were slumped down in their chairs at a local lunch spot, nibbling at sandwiches and looking exhausted. Both of them went to the same elite school, and both were enmeshed in one of the most exhausting and time-consuming quests a student can subject himself to: the search for a Wall Street summer internship.

“I went to two or three of my ten meetings for class this week," one of the juniors said. "One day, I had a first-round, a Superday, then came back to campus for another first-round. But that's banking. If you can handle the interviews, you can probably handle the job."

The students had both spent the past two-plus years checking all the right boxes to become Wall Street interns. They had gotten themselves admitted to so-called “target schools” (colleges at which big banks focus their recruiting efforts) and once there, they’d racked up advanced finance and economics classes, student leadership positions, and stellar grades. And now they were mounting their attacks on the biggest banks on Wall Street — Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and a dozen more.

The increasing battle for internships has also upped the amount of sector-specific knowledge would-be interns are expected to have. At one recent interview, one aspiring bank intern was asked complex questions such as: “How does debt affect Beta?” and “What is a Nash equilibrium?”

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/02/how-wall-st-interns-became-a-cottage-industry.html