This blogpost aims at shedding light on the Summer Internship Programme offered at Lazard by a current intern in the London office
Hi, my name is Zehn Mehmood and I’m currently studying Chemical Engineering at the University of Cambridge having just finished my third year. The purpose of this blog is to give some first–hand insight into what life is like as an intern at Lazard in terms of both the work you’ll do and the experience in general.
It’s the end of week four on the ten week programme. The first week consisted of technical training with an external company: Fitch Learning. We covered in-depth excel training to financial statement analysis and touched on valuation. It was also incredibly useful to learn various excel short-cuts which came in handy later on during on-the-job work. It also helped that the trainer we had was very thorough yet had a great sense of humour which kept us all engaged throughout the day.
All the interns got assigned a team based on previously submitted choices. I’m in Business Services which covers companies from Facilities Management to IT Infrastructure and Education. Week one involved pulling together a briefing note with my Analyst buddy for an MD ahead of a client meeting for which the company was looking to expand operations to the US and Europe. The task consisted of digging into and summarising the financials of the company; understanding the various businesses within the company and researching it’s latest M&A activity and debt issuances.
Week two – I was staffed on a live project as part of a sell-side process. This has involved listening in on calls with the company management team and other advisers. I was tasked with producing the meeting notes for the calls and updating our internal buyer logs to track the process.
At Lazard the teams are relatively small compared to other places and this is particularly true of my team which consists of just eight members. Small teams allow juniors to get real exposure to both senior bankers and clients. I experienced this first-hand having the opportunity to attend a meeting with the CEO and CFO of the company as well as asking questions to the Head of Business Development to help guide a teaser document ahead of the sale process.
It is, of course, no surprise that working hours are not 9-til-5 in investment banking though there have been a number of ways to help manage workload for interns during the programme including a dedicated staffer for each intern and an intern co-ordinator. Separately, initiatives under “Work to Wellness” have been great to ease stress during the week – just this week we all did yoga as part of the scheme, which I must admit, was quite relaxing after a long day.
This week also gave us the opportunity to meet with senior bankers during the MDs lunch. I found the seniors to be open and genuinely interested in us – which was certainly encouraging coming in at the bottom of the ladder as it were.
I look forward to everything else the internship has to offer!