- Citi is guaranteeing its summer interns in New York, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo full-time offers before their shortened five-week program kicks off this July.
- It’s an effort to relieve some of the uncertainty felt by students, Courtney Storz, head of global campus recruiting at Citi, told Business Insider.
- “It was the best news that I could ever receive,” said Selin Avcilar, an incoming investment banking intern at Citi.
- Citi, like many banks, is still deciding whether it will host its interns remotely this summer.
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A summer internship at a big bank is a rite of passage for any college student that wants a career on Wall Street.
For 10 weeks each year, rising juniors and seniors work alongside traders and investment bankers to learn the ropes and network their way to a full-time offer.
But the global coronavirus pandemic has derailed banks’ plans for their summer programs. Citi told its incoming class of interns yesterday that it will shorten the internship program from 10 to five weeks, pushing its start date from June 1st to July 6th. Interns will still be paid for the full 10 weeks.
In the same email, Citi also told interns in New York, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo — about 75% of the class — that they’re guaranteed a full-time offer.
The coronavirus pandemic has derailed banks’ summer plans
Citi is one of several big banks trying to figure out how to host its class of interns this year amid the global coronavirus pandemic.
Goldman Sachs told its interns on Tuesday that the program will be cut in half to five weeks. JP Morgan has also pushed back its interns’ start date to July and is considering whether to do the internships virtually, according to media reports. Both programs will be paying interns for the original, full 10-week program.
Many major banks are currently weighing virtual options for their intern classes, as the summer gets closer and there continues to be uncertainty around when people will return to work in their offices.
Citi hasn’t yet decided if the abbreviated internship program will be run in its global offices or virtually. The bank is working through its contingency plans and will make a decision in the “very near future,” Courtney Storz, head of global campus recruiting at Citi, told Business Insider.
Through its own research and student feedback from universities and research partners, it was clear to Citi that providing a summer internship experience — no matter the form it takes — is a key way for Citi to give students an understanding of what it would be like to work there full time.
So while the bank is still deciding whether to go virtual, canceling the program altogether was never an option, Storz said.
‘The right thing to do’
“I don’t want to say it was an easy decision, but we recognize the tremendous amount of uncertainty that exists right now,” said Storz. “We’re feeling it obviously at Citi and we know that students are feeling it.”
After speaking with universities’ career services and administrators as well as students, Citi ultimately made the decision to still run the internship program but guarantee the participating interns a full-time offer at the end.
“I really became clear to us that this was the right thing to do,” said Storz.
For big banks, summer intern classes feed into their full-time hiring pipelines. So getting an internship offer in the first place isn’t easy. Students often start their networking journeys with the big banks as early as freshman year, attending different events and programs before being considered for an intensive internship.
“We have a robust assessment process,” said Storz. “So we really feel comfortable with the folks that we have coming in and we know that we’ve maintained that high bar in interviewing for the summer program.”
Calming Gen Z’s nerves
Feeling unsure about what this summer would look like, Selin Avcilar, an incoming investment banking intern at Citi, said that there was a lot of concern amongst her peers, especially those who were having their summer internships canceled.
“The last month has just been really hectic,” said Avcilar. “All of a sudden, we found out that school was going virtual for two weeks. Then it was until the end of April, and then it was for the rest of the semester.”
Avcilar is a rising senior at NYU, where she majors in economics. Avcilar interned at Citi last summer, too, returning for a second internship in hopes of a full-time offer.
“There was definitely a lot of anxiety between all of the students regarding everybody’s summer internships,” Avcilar said.
About a month ago, Avcilar and her fellow interns received an email from Citi confirming that their summer offers weren’t in jeopardy, which calmed some of their nerves.
And with this latest news, Avcilar said much of her anxiety around her future job prospects was relieved.
“It was the best news that I could ever receive because I really wanted to be full time at Citi,” Avcilar said.
Avcilar and a select group of other incoming interns had the news delivered personally from Citi’s CFO Mark Mason on Zoom calls.
“I was worried about where the economy was going, as everybody was very worried about where the economy was going, and this was just getting rid of all my anxiety, getting rid of all my worries,” said Avcilar.
“Although this won’t be the typical summer internship where you get that full 10 week experience meeting with everybody in the company, meeting with all the interns, going for coffee with your team,” said Avcilar, “I know that Citi is definitely making the best of the situation.”
Meeting minimum requirements
In its email to incoming interns, Citi specified that they’d be guaranteed full-time offer, contingent upon meeting “minimum requirements.” And since the bank hasn’t yet decided whether the five-week program will be virtual or not, it’s still sorting out exactly what those requirements will be.
“It’s still a little bit of a work in progress,” said Storz.
Internships usually involve day-to-day work, plenty of training, and a healthy amount of networking with firm leadership and teams across different business units.
A remote internship would likely involve more project-based work to give interns an understanding of their business units, since they won’t necessarily be able to work directly with bankers and traders on live deals, Storz said.
“It would be really unrealistic for us to think that we can completely embed students into the day-to-day business operations of banking or sales and trading,” said Storz.
And while engaging interns remotely may be a challenge, Citi expects that interns actively participate in any training, projects, or other programming.
“We want to make sure that whatever we create as a program experience is something that the folks that we are asking to participate are actually going to participate in,” said Storz.
So to keep the full-time offer, interns will need to adapt and participate in the program, whatever form it may take.
“We’ll have checkpoints along the way,” said Storz, “but really the goal here is to make sure that when we roll out some kind of experience, anticipating that it may well be virtual, that the individuals that are part of the program are completing all of the requirements that we have.”
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