Banking spring weeks: What you need to know

If you’re a first-year undergraduate student at university interested in getting into investment banking, you might be mentally preparing to start your spring week.

Click here to join the bubble by eFinancialCareers, our new anonymous community. ✍️

If you’re also in your first year at university and you don't even know what a spring week is, bad luck.

Spring weeks, known as sophomore internships in the USA, are an integral, and increasingly important, part of the investment banking recruitment cycle. Many banks rely on them to recruit summer interns, and therefore – by proxy – junior bankers.

Therefore, if you don't have a banking spring week, it's harder to get a banking internship. And if you don't have a banking internship, it's harder to get a banking job when you graduate. So – if it’s not too late for you – what do you need to know about spring weeks?

What is a spring week in a bank?

Spring weeks are short internships, usually lasting just a few days or a week, set around springtime. They are an opportunity for a firm to get to know you, and potentially accelerate you through the summer internship recruitment process the following year. If you do well in a spring week, banks may even offer you a place on a summer internship outright, although only a minority of students benefit from this.

One student, who completed a spring internship at a major bank in London, told us that his spring week was “an informational session,” and was more focused on the bank advertising to you – there were “different panels discussing the bank’s culture, divisions’ roles."

Another student, with a number of different spring weeks under her belt, agreed. “I spent most of my time listening to panel talks introducing the company’s business lines,” she said. “We also did job simulations and networking sessions to construct early understanding of the industry.”

Networking is a big part of the spring week. You’ll meet people more senior to you. The students we spoke to for this article also all said that they were in touch with some of their fellow interns, forming a part of their professional network going forward.

How do you apply for a spring week in a bank?

You need to apply for spring weeks as soon as they open, which is usually in October the year before the week takes place. Closing dates for applications vary but are often November. That means, for a spring week in 2027, you’ll have to apply in October 2026.

Spring week applications generally involve three stages: an online assessment, HireVue interview, and a human interview, either digitally or in-person.

There isn't a specific profile of the ideal spring week candidate, and you don't need to study a specific subject to get offered the opportunity. "The recruiters there explicitly said that they were looking for high potential candidates, with great academics, but who perhaps hadn’t considered consulting as a career choice," one student who did a spring week (at a major consulting firm) told us. "As a result, they really didn’t have many technical expectations coming into the spring week."

How many spring weeks can you do?

Hypothetically – and ideally – as many as possible.

One student that we spoke to did multiple spring internships – more than five – across multiple industries, including investment banking. “I wanted to try out different industries to test which ones are my favorites,” he said. “University students like me are usually open to various roles, but at the same time I want to find the most suitable types for me as soon as possible, so that I can target my job hunting at those specific areas.”

No matter the exact number of spring week internships you do apply to, you should be applying to as many as possible. Last year, a poll of students in a private group chat showed that around a quarter didn’t receive a single spring internship offer, and less than 45% received a single internship offer. Only around 30% received an offer for multiple internships.

How can a spring week help you?

Spring weeks are very useful. As we mentioned before, it can lead to exposure to varied industries, the chance to network with your peers and (future) colleagues and maybe learn a few things in the process.

Most importantly, a spring week can lead to a summer internship. This varies quite wildly between banks. Some banks, such as Morgan Stanley, recruit their summer intern cohort exclusively from their spring intern class. Some don’t recruiter summer interns from spring weeks at all.

Many banks fast-track all their spring interns into the summer internship recruitment process – for example, automatically offering them assessment centre interviews, allowing them to skip much of the application process. They also offer a small number summer internships directly, but the exact number varies significantly between banks, and not all do this.

How should I prepare for a spring week?

You don’t need a strong technical foundation for a spring week. Banks know you are a first-year student, and they’re more interested in who you are as an individual.

“The bank didn’t have any expectations of prior technical or advanced markets knowledge,” one spring intern told us. “They never ask advanced technicals at spring conversions or summer internship interviews.”

Another student concurred. You need “an interest in the industry and some very basic understandings, like the recent market news, if you’re on the markets track.” On top of that, “behaviorally, you will need to collaborate well in teams, handle conflict with your colleagues, follow company rules, deliver hard work, and attention to detail.”

What if you don’t covert your spring week into a summer internship?

If you don’t get an offer at the end of the internship, or if the spring week you completed didn’t directly recruit for a summer program, don’t be discouraged.

A report last year showed that just one quarter of accepted applicants to a financial services summer internship had completed a spring week previously. Those applicants that did have a spring internship, however, were nearly twice as likely to receive an interview to a summer program. A spring internship is useful, but not critical, to getting a financial services job.

What do you do if you don’t get a spring week?

If you don’t manage to get a spring week, it’s not the end of the world. For one, you should definitely be looking for finance internships, both spring and summer, no matter what, even if they’re in fintech or at firms you’re not particularly interested in.

Another option is doing an off-cycle internship. These are arguably more valuable from a learning point of view than the traditional spring/summer internship cycle. If you’re EMEA-based, doing them outside of London might even lead to unique networking opportunities, given the relative sizes of teams and how much closer you are on the chain of command to the decision makers and revenue generators of the firm.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22  Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. 

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.