How to get an internship at Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley, an investment banking giant established in 1935, deals primarily in institutional securities, wealth management, and investment management. Essentially, Morgan Stanley advises, originates, trades, manages, and distributes capital for governments, institutions, and individuals.
What are the types of internships at Morgan Stanley and who is eligible?
Morgan Stanley offers internships to students pursuing bachelors, masters, or Ph.D. in computer science and related engineering disciplines and MBA across their offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru. The internships are categorized as the summer analyst and off-cycle internships. The former invites applications for summer internships at Morgan Stanley while one can apply to the latter throughout the year.
Engineering students can apply to Morgan Stanley internships in profiles such as technology and data analysis. The technical internships last 6 months commencing in January and July. Another set of hiring takes place in May when the company hires interns for a duration of two months. Management students can find internships in profiles such as operations, investment banking, human resources, finance, merchant banking & real estate, etc. Management internships typically last 10 weeks. Morgan Stanley offers a monthly stipend of 25K – 35K.
How to apply to an internship at Morgan Stanley?
1. Apply online – Internships – Morgan Stanley careers
You can apply to Morgan Stanley summer internships online through their official careers page. Students are asked to write their graduation date, CGPA, and a cover letter while applying to Morgan Stanley online.
2. Campus placement – Morgan Stanley hires extensively from colleges like IITs and IIMs.
3. Employer Referral – If you know someone who works at Morgan Stanley, ask them to refer you for an internship. You can also try connecting with their employees through LinkedIn.
What after applying to an internship in Morgan Stanley?
The shortlisted candidates are called for a telephonic interview or an online test if they have applied for a technical internship. The online test consists of 20 MCQs on probability, statistics, data structure and algorithms, operating systems, and concepts of OOPs along with 4 programming questions. This is followed by a technical interview wherein the recruiter asks you a few questions related to your previous work experience and projects along with a bunch of technical questions on OOPs, data structures, and dynamic programming. Some sample questions are –
1. What are stacks and queues?
2. What are friend class and friend function? When are they used?
3. Explain call by value and call by reference using call stack.
4. Given a binary tree, print all the boundary nodes.
5. What will you prefer for stack implementation – arrays or linked lists?
6. How will you solve a deadlock?
The Morgan Stanley HR interview questions are pretty generic such as –
1. Why do you want to join Morgan Stanley?
2. Why should we hire you?
3. Tell us what you know about Morgan Stanley.
4. What are your career goals?
If you’re a management student applying for a Morgan Stanley investment banking internship, brace yourself to get grilled. In the investment banking interview, you’ll be asked questions like –
1. What are the financial statements and how are they related?
2. Walk me through DCF.
3. What are the different ways to value a company?
4. Should the company acquire another company in cash or stock?
5. What are accretion and dilution?
6. What is discounted rate?
7. How to combine balance sheets in acquisition?
For more insights into Morgan Stanley recruitment, you can read Shivanshu’s experience of Morgan Stanley interviews.
What to expect once your Morgan Stanley internship begins?
Every intern at Morgan Stanley is placed in their Strats & Modelling department. The tech department of Morgan Stanley has a development team and an infrastructure team. The former is tasked with designing, developing, and maintaining applications used by the firm’s business units and the latter is responsible for developing cutting-edge systems to run the business. The interns are assigned a team and are provided with a junior and senior mentor. The work timings are pretty flexible. Interns at Morgan Stanley get a wide exposure to senior management and on-the-job training along with many networking opportunities.
Getting placed – The interns who perform exceptionally well and build a great rapport with their teams get a pre-placement offer after a set of interviews. It is a tough process but Morgan Stanley internships include extensive learning opportunities and feedback sessions for one to improve.
The pre-placement interviews comprise a technical, a technical cum HR, and an HR interview. Some of the questions asked in these interviews are –
1. What is malloc?
2. What are collections in Java?
3. What feedback do you have for your team members
4. How was your experience at Morgan Stanley?
5. Explain your internship project in brief.
6. Did you have a conflict of opinion with your team members?
A couple of pro-tips –
1. For technical profiles, you need to have an experience in Java, C#, or C and a working knowledge of Windows or Unix.
2. If you’re applying for a finance internship, you must have strong analytical skills, knowledge of MS-Excel, and an excellent understanding of financial products.
3. Practice a lot of programming questions from online sources.
Word of advice from hiring managers –
1. Research about the company and know the current happenings in Morgan Stanley and the recently completed deals.
2. Morgan Stanley looks for all-rounder candidates, so write about your interests, experiences, and what makes you unique along with your academic qualifications in your cover letter.
3. Make sure you know everything that you’ve mentioned in your resume.
For a closer understanding of the projects assigned to interns, you can read Karan’s exhilarating internship journey and Varun’s experience when he interned at Morgan Stanley, Mumbai.
Now that you have a clarity on Morgan Stanley’s hiring process, apply to their summer analyst programs and land yourself a summer internship at Morgan Stanley. You can also look for similar management and technical internships on Internshala.
