u/Final_jelly_7

After wrapping up our process, I thought it might be useful to offer some concrete advice in whatever way possible so doing an AMA.

I’ve been actively involved with recruiting, mentorship, and career development throughout my career in finance, and this year a few things really stood out to me:

• Lots of applications felt AI-generated, especially the short-answer responses. Becomes obvious when you're looking at a table of typeform answers.
• "Value-add" attachments. This year more than ever before I saw investment memos for Andruil, DCFs for OpenAI, DefenseTech market maps. I'm a pre-seed b2b software investor.
• A lot of resumes felt overly padded, with stacked roles, two-week “winternships,” remote fellowships. Hard to believe you learned anything.

I get why students are doing this. The internship market is competitive, everyone is trying to stand out, and people are getting conflicting advice from TikTok, LinkedIn, career centers, friends, AI tools, and random resume templates.

I’m happy to answer questions about resumes, cold emails, interviews, VC and startup internships, what stood out, what blended in, common mistakes, and what I’d do differently if I were applying today.

AMA.

Genuine question from someone who hires interns but does not have kids.

Quick background on why I even care: long time ago, I was a community college dropout who got the idea that I needed to be an investment banker. I had to figure the path out on my own and I’ve stayed close to recruiting ever since.

Today, I run a small venture capital fund, and we recently hired for our summer internship. In all my years hiring interns and being around recruiting, this was the first time I had parents reach out to me on behalf of their kids. I’d never had one. This year I heard from seven.

Let me be super clear, this is not about judgement. I don’t blame parents for wanting to help their kids out. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the world right now and it also feels like everyone else has some cheat code, connection, angle, or playbook that you somehow do not have access to. I get why parents would want to help.

It is really competitive. To put some numbers around it, we are a tiny shop that you have never heard of and we had something like 250+ applications plus countless emails and DMs for one spot.

What felt new to me was the degree of parental involvement around the actual process, especially from people I genuinely had no meaningful connection to. It wasn’t anything demanding or rude, but it was very much like they were trying to “coffee chat” me for their kid, ask about the process, open the door, get advice, make the intro, follow up, etc.

That’s not to say parents haven’t ever been involved at all. Back in my investment banking days, it was the random senior banker who’d materialize at my desk a couple hours before an interview block like “hey bud, I heard you’re talking with Jimmy today. I told him to wear a tie, so if he shows up looking like an idiot, let me know.”

Obviously, that conversation was not actually about Jimmy’s tie.

From the parent perspective, does internship and early-career recruiting now feel like an arena where your kids need real support from you? Is this the college search-ification of early careers? Like has the process become confusing enough that expecting them to figure it out alone feels unrealistic?

For those of you with college-age kids, how do you think about this?