Gone are the cozy deskside chats and boozy networking nights at packed bars. In are daily health checks and recommendations for masking up.
The approach of summer means the annual rite of passage for hundreds of would-be financiers: the Wall Street internship. After more than a year of remote work and scattered employees, several of New York’s banks are gearing up to bring throngs of young people into the office over the coming weeks—attempting both a return to normalcy and the establishment of new routines.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. has begun briefing interns about safety protocols and office regulations. Deutsche Bank AG is coordinating schedules to ensure it has enough staffers on site to mentor young workers. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has advised managers to host social gatherings outside and to take attendance, for contact-tracing purposes.
“We’re going to try and make this, frankly, as normal as possible,” said Gerry Keefe, head of global banking for the Americas at HSBC Holdings Plc. “Although the floors won’t be at the same density as they were pre-Covid, we’ll still have a critical mass in place.”
For Wall Street’s largest banks, the return of interns marks the start of a get-back-to-normal summer as the Covid-19 pandemic ebbs in America. Goldman Sachs is seeking to have U.S. employees back to the office by mid-June, while JPMorgan workers will follow suit a few weeks later. New York itself is livening up with the return of 24-hour-a-day subway service and the reopening of bars and restaurants at full capacity.
The city’s revival is slow going—only about 18% of the metro area’s office workers have returned, according to security company Kastle Systems—and finance firms including Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. have opted to keep their internships virtual. Still, hundreds of college students will flock to Wall Street’s hallowed trading floors and investment banking desks in the coming weeks in the hopes of proving themselves and landing one of the few spots in analyst programs.
Candidates spend months interviewing for the coveted internship spots and offers are generally handed out a year in advance. Banks have been known to hand out acceptance letters to less than 2% of applicants.
Last year, companies hurriedly converted their internship programs to a virtual format as coronavirus cases swelled nationwide. As banks try to cajole their broader workforce back to the office, one of their main arguments against Zoom culture has been that younger workers have struggled to learn without the mentorship and camaraderie that come from being together.
“The apprenticeship culture is one that is prized in banking and those of us who have been in banking for a long time definitely benefited from it and remember it fondly,” said Keefe. “Most people can tell you off the top of their head who the two or three senior bankers were when they were junior bankers who invested time in them.”
Some of the social aspects of the summer internship won’t make a return just yet. Most firms aren’t planning to provide interns with housing, one of the ways they have historically hung out after hours. At HSBC, the bank will use lunches with senior executives and volunteering activities to encourage interns to network with each other and employees from across the company.