Time to Start Thinking About Your Finance Internship

If you're looking to break into a career in finance (e.g., investment banking, mergers and acquisitions), an internship is the easiest way to get your foot in the door. Finance internships--at the undergraduate and MBA level--are really extended interviews for full-time analyst and associate positions. They offer extensive training, hands-on experience, networking opportunities and a lot of great perks. Banks and firms really put their analysts and associates to work, so they want to make sure you can handle the job.

Luckily, getting in front of a potential bank or firm isn't too hard when you're in school. Internship on-campus recruiting usually starts right after recruiting for full-time jobs. This means that information sessions and meet-and-greets are coming up in October and interviewing will start in January/February. Even though that sounds far off, it's really not. You should start researching your target firms right now. Check out the new 2011 Vault Banking Top 50 rankings and read our firm profiles to see what life is like at each top bank or firm.

At the internship level, each year we rank the Top 10 Finance Internships--the programs that offer the best training to launch your finance career. Here is last summer's 2010 Top 10 Finance Internships (the 2011 Top 10 will be released in November):

2010 Top 10 Finance Internships

• Goldman Sachs & Co.
• J.P. Morgan's Investment Bank
• KPMG
• Lazard
• McGladrey
• Morgan Stanley
• Northwestern Mutual Financial Network
• PricewaterhouseCoopers
• Sponsors for Educational Opportunity
• The Boston Consulting Group