Every question below is one a freshman sent us.
Why cold email
Because the large banks size their summer class to their full-time hiring, and the internship is the interview for the job. Goldman's own eligibility line says the summer analyst role is normally for students in their third or penultimate year of study. That's not a filter on how good you are. It's a filter on when you graduate, and there is no version of your resume that beats it.
The mistake is concluding that finance hires this way. Goldman hires this way. Goldman is one firm.
Cold outreach. Absent a family connection, that's the mechanism.
There are roughly 29,565 investment banking and securities firms in the United States, and the average one employs about 13 people. A 13 person firm has no campus recruiter, no application portal, and no rule about class year, because writing rules like that is a job that nobody there has time to do. What they do have is more work than people.
Those firms almost never post the role. If you want one, you email and ask.
A small investment bank. Where a bulge bracket like Goldman or JPMorgan has tens of thousands of employees, a boutique might have a hundred, or twelve.
Regional boutiques cover one city or region. Sector boutiques cover one industry, like healthcare or industrials. Both do the same core work as a large bank, which is advising companies on selling themselves, buying someone else, or raising money.
The size is the whole point. A firm too small to run a recruiting program is also too small to run a class-year filter.
You never want to cold email a firm like GS or JPM asking for an internship, because the internship does not exist outside the portal. Networking there is real and it matters, but what it does is get your application read. It cannot replace the application, because the application is the only door.
At a regional boutique there is no portal and no cycle. The email is the door.
Two different activities, same medium. Confusing them is the most common thing we see freshmen do.
Sooner than your career center will tell you.
Investment banking recruits about 18 months ahead. The summer 2027 applications opened and closed between December 2025 and January 2026 at the major banks. If that pattern holds, the class of 2029 will be applying for junior summer around December 2027, which is the fall of sophomore year.
Work backwards from that and something uncomfortable falls out. Banks will read your resume before your sophomore internship has happened. The only finished experience on it is your freshman summer. That's the line you're filling now.
Apply to them. Goldman's Possibilities Series and JPMorgan's Freshman Focus are open to first years and they're genuinely useful for meeting people.
But be clear about what they are. They run a few hours to a few days. They're recruiting events, and the bank's goal is to identify you early, not to give you work. Nothing about them goes on your resume as experience. Do both: apply to the programs, and send the emails.
Which firms
You can do this yourself. Search LinkedIn by the "Investment Banking" industry filter, pull firms from Axial, and cross-reference SEC and FINRA registration lists. Nothing about the raw information is secret.
It takes a long time, which is the reason we built the product. We aggregated the firms into one interface with a verified contact at each, so you're not stitching together four datasets and a spreadsheet before you write your first email.
Two filters do most of the work.
Small enough that hiring is informal. If the firm has a careers page with a summer analyst program on it, you are back in the portal system and your class year will screen you out.
Big enough to have work to hand off. A two-person shop usually doesn't have anything to give an intern, even if they like you.
The band in between is most of the industry. On NetworkIQ you can filter by headcount, sector, and city so you're only reading firms that fit.
Enough that one says yes. Nobody can hand you a number, and anyone who quotes you one is guessing at your resume, your school, and your writing.
The published ranges are wide. Mergers & Inquisitions puts a good template sent to the right people at 10 to 25 percent, and plain cold contacts with no shared connection much lower, in the low single digits. Students post 1 to 5 percent on forums regularly. Take the pessimistic end and assume 3 percent: 100 emails is three conversations. Two of those go nowhere. One might not.
That is the entire premise. Each email is quick, so volume is the lever you control, and volume is the only lever a freshman has.
What to send
Three things move the response rate more than anything else.
Keep it under 125 words. Bankers read on their phones between meetings.
The amount of time you spend researching per cold email is something everyone does differently. Some people spray and pray with one template. Some hyper-personalize every send. Both work. Run both for two weeks and see which one gets you replies, because the answer depends on your writing more than on the theory.
Nobody expects a freshman to have experience. They expect a freshman to be useful and to have done their homework.
Useful means specific hours and a specific window. "10 hours a week this semester" is a real offer. "Any opportunity you may have" is not.
Homework means one sentence proving you looked into the firm before writing. That sentence is the entire difference between an email that reads as sent to you and an email that reads as sent to 400 people.
For the bulge brackets, school matters, because they recruit on campus at a fixed list. That's the whole reason the target school concept exists.
For a 13 person regional bank, there is no list. Nobody there is comparing your school to a tier chart. They're deciding whether a student who emailed them in October is worth 20 minutes.
At a small firm, senior. Managing Director, Partner, or whoever is named as founder, because at that size they are the person who decides.
That inverts at large firms, where analysts and associates are more likely to reply and can walk your resume upstairs. But large firms are not who you're emailing here.
Follow up once, about a week later, in the same thread. Most replies students get come after a follow-up rather than the first send.
After that, move on. Silence at a boutique usually means the email arrived during a live deal, not that you were rejected. Send more emails rather than rewriting the same one for the fifth time.
Does it count
Yes, and for a specific reason. Recruiters at the larger banks are not scoring the brand on your resume in freshman year. They're checking whether your interest in finance is real, and the only evidence of that is having done some.
An unknown 20 person firm in your hometown where you built comps and sat in on calls is better evidence than a recognizable brand where you did nothing. And it gives you something to talk about in an interview, which is the actual bottleneck.
Yes, and the structural argument is the same or stronger. PE and VC firms are usually smaller than banks, hire even more informally, and post almost nothing publicly. Our database covers IB, PE, and VC firms.
The difference is what you offer. Banks want execution help. Smaller funds often want sourcing and research, which is work a freshman can genuinely do.
The product
If you let a model write the whole email, yes. Bankers say openly that generated outreach is easy to spot, and the tells are the ones you'd expect: no specifics, inflated language, and a subject line nobody would type.
That's not what the tool does. You write the template in your own words, once. We generate one research sentence about that specific firm, and you review every email before it sends. The part that sounds like you is the part you wrote.
Public filings and public web sources. SEC and FINRA registration data, Form ADV and Form D filings, and firm websites, cleaned and deduplicated, with a contact matched to each firm and verified before it goes in.
Firms drop off the list when we can't verify them. A dead list is worse than a short one, because the cost of a bad row isn't the row, it's the hour you spend writing to a name that doesn't work there anymore.
You could. We did, by hand, and it took most of a semester before either of us sent a single email.
What you're paying for is the part that isn't thinking: finding the firms, finding a real contact, and getting an email drafted. What you can't outsource is the writing and the follow-through, and those are what determine whether this works for you.
The student plan is free with a .edu email. Use it until the ceiling annoys you.
Worth asking before you spend a semester on it.
A lot of my classmates recruit for finance because everyone around them does, then they learn what an entry-level IB job is actually like and realize it isn't for them. Before anything else, speak with analysts, or whoever you can get in touch with, and understand the industry.
If you decide it's for you, come back and start emailing.