What specifically does your Summer Analyst role mean in terms of what you do at Goldman Sachs?

Your role as a Compliance Summer Analyst depends on which team you’re placed on within the Compliance Division. If you go on Goldman Sachs’ website, you’ll see that there are two kinds of Compliance: divisional and centralized. If you’re placed on a divisional team (i.e. Investment Banking, Asset Management, etc.) then you sit on the same floor as that business and provide regulatory guidance solely for that group. If you sit on a centralized team, then the work that you do covers the entire firm. These teams include Financial Crime Compliance, Surveillance Analytics, Consumer Compliance, and more. In summary, it’s difficult to place exactly what a Compliance Summer Analyst does. One person’s day-to-day schedule will drastically differ from another’s.

I worked in GSAM's Fixed Income division so I can only truly speak to that experience. Different groups might run their programs differently and my statements represent only my own experience, I do not speak for the firm. As a summer analyst, I would spend most of my time working on rotational investment analysis projects (3 rotations in 10 weeks) which means researching and thoroughly understanding a few companies in a sector to deliver an investment recommendation of buy or sell. Summer analysts were also all the time sitting in on call/meeting with more senior team members to get hand-on experience seeing how the business is run.

As a summer analyst, I worked on about 10 projects over the 10 weeks. Some of them were short-term and quick but others were long-term, so I joined some projects that had been in progress. I was specifically in Reward team in HCM and worked on brochures, some system development stuff, and data analysis. I know some departments (especially Securities) have a rotation program, where you can see different functions and meet a lot of people. Overall, interns are expected to develop analytical thinking, communication skill and teamwork in all the departments.

It's essentially 40% of what a full time analyst would do. You're assigned a project, given 3-8 deliverables for the project and you have 10 (really 8) weeks to make a dent into the project. It's not essential work, but it gives you a sneak preview of what it would be like if you were there full time.