Every year, young Wall Street hopefuls jockey for internships at banks like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley.
But Business Insider spoke to some incoming summer analysts who told us they care less about which bank they end up with, and more about the team they join within that bank.
That's where the real prestige lies.
"People choose banks based on what group [inside the banks] they can get into," one analyst said.
Groups are the specific teams that each intern is assigned to, be it an industry group like real estate or healthcare on the investment banking side, an advisory group like mergers and acquisitions, or, on the trading side, a commodities, foreign exchange, or equities trading group.
Bad groups, according to the summer analyst, are the ones that don't get a lot of deal flow.
Sometimes interns get to rotate across a multiple groups, but usually, going in, they have a few top choices in mind.
So how do they get into their first-choice groups?
In the same way that interns play the banks off of one another to leverage interviews and score initial offers, they also leverage which groups they get into in order to land even better ones.
The first analyst did not end up at Goldman, JP, or Morgan Stanley. But she did score a spot in an M&A group at her bank, which was the team she wanted most.
After accepting an initial offer at her bank, she began networking with a contact in M&A at Credit Suisse, a rival bank. Then she used her conversations with that contact as leverage to land the M&A offer at her own bank.
"The most important thing for me was that I wanted to be in a good group, whatever bank I ended up in," she said.
Did you land a Wall Street internship this summer? How did you decide which offer to accept? Send us an email at pcrowe@businessinsider.com. We can keep you anonymous.
SEE ALSO: The key to scoring a top internship on Wall Street
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