If you’re a first-year student gunning for a spring week internship to kick off your investment banking career, you might be a bit intimidated.
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And if you’ve received an offer to attend a spring week, you might not know what to expect, what to do, or maybe even what to wear. Have no fear – the London School of Economics Student Union Business and Investment Group (LSESUBIG) can offer some help, courtesy of their 32-page Spring Week Guide.
Converting spring week into an internship
It turns out that an investment bank spring week is mostly about learning, attending talks, and networking. But at the end of it, you’ll have an assessment centre (AC). An AC involves interviews with senior people in banks and a case study.
This spring week case study is critical – and you have to prepare for it, because during the AC, a bank will assess if they want to offer you a summer internship. The summer internship is what gets you the job in an investment bank.
Only a minority of people who achieve spring weeks in investment banks will convert them into summer internship offers. Data from internship application tracker Trackr, formerly known as the Bristol Tracker, showed that only 31% of spring interns went on to be offered summer internship positions last year.
If you want to convert your spring week, you’ll need to “dress your smartest”, “not be late”, and “always demonstrate your attention.” You will need to practise the art of flattery. After your internship, “follow up any conversations you have with employees with LinkedIn messages or emails,” the LSESUBIG says, and “stay back for any social events and build a strong rapport with HR.”
Most of all though, you will need to excel at the case study.
The banking spring week case study
The case study is a task given to a group of interns to demonstrate teamwork and ability.
The LSESUBIG offers two examples of what spring week case studies might entail. The first is trawling hundreds of pages of documentation from an old deal to answer a set of questions. The second is to do the same for a hypothetical deal – and to offer recommendations as a group.
The value comes from how you demonstrate your ability to work together as a team, as well as how novel your insights are.
The LSESUBIG recommends that, before starting on the case study, each team member should “quickly go through the instructions independently, think about your own strengths and weaknesses, and where you can contribute to the task the best.”
Once your role in the team has been established, “work at a reasonable pace to perform your role.” Don’t waste time. “Be critical of everything and only investigate a piece of information if it may be valuable.”
After that, sit down as a team and compare notes. For the LSESUBIG, this is not just a practical exercise, but a philosophical one: “This will not only help you understand what others have done,” it says, but “it will also enable you to think about the weaknesses in your thesis/component.”
Finally, never forget to be a good presenter. “Keep your cool, always refer to your notes if you forget something, and support your team members if they need help.”
Getting a banking spring week in the first place
Spring week 2026 applications in London will open, mostly for first-year applicants, in a few weeks. Some are open already – mostly for buy-side firms including asset manager BlackRock, private equity firm Blackstone, and hedge fund Point72. The only major bank with open spring week applications is JPMorgan.
Before you even get to the case study, you’ll need to interview for the spring week. – We have a comprehensive list of banking interview questions.
Because you don’t have a lot of experience, spring week interviews will be focused on who you are as a person. “There may be a lot of emphasis on your journey to your current point,” the LSESUBIG says, “and you really need a strong story that you can sell to these bankers.”
It’s not just about you – presuming you’re not talking to a HireVue screen, asking questions of your interviewer is also important. The LSESUBIG recommends that you ask a senior banker interviewing you about their “personal leadership philosophy”, as well as the “principles or structures” that they follow which “enable [them] to lead better”.
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