Three weeks at a CITIC Securities branch office

The summer after my sophomore year, I applied for a research internship at CITIC Securities. It is one of China's largest securities firms, and I wanted to see what a research desk looked like from the inside. When I arrived in July 2022, I learned that I had instead been assigned to a Shenzhen branch office.

What the work actually was

A branch office is not a research desk. Nearly every part of the day faced the customer:

• Cold-calling and follow-up calls to retail clients, scripted around the firm's product-of-the-week
• Account-opening paperwork: KYC forms, signature collection, compliance checklists
• Pitch-deck prep for in-person client meetings, which were mostly product walk-throughs rather than market analysis
• Calendar coordination, document filing, and the kind of administration that measures a day in fields completed rather than questions answered

The number that mattered was new AUM. The skill that mattered was moving a client from curiosity to signature without losing them along the way. That is real work, and it takes real skill. It was also not what I thought I had signed up to learn when I told my school I would spend two months at a leading Chinese securities firm.

Why I left after three weeks

Two reasons, in their honest order.

First was the distance between the advertised role and the lived one. The company name, badge, and email address were all genuine, but a securities firm contains many different lives. Branch sales and sell-side research may share a lobby; their ordinary Tuesdays have almost nothing in common. By the end of the second week, I knew I would not learn what I had come to learn. Staying out of politeness would waste both their time and mine.

Second was the COVID context. Shenzhen in the summer of 2022 still faced recurrent lockdowns, and the office had its own contingency plan. Once the learning case for staying had weakened, even a modest chance of spending a week in hotel quarantine was enough to settle the question. I handed over my work and went home.

Why I'm leaving this entry on the site

It would be easy to remove CITIC from the timeline and pretend that July was simply a little longer than usual. I leave it in because those three weeks have proved useful more than once.

What I learned was specific: research and sales are two different jobs that happen to share a lobby. An organization chart places both inside "the firm," but their work, incentives, colleagues, and daily questions are entirely different. Later, while applying for internships at SIPA, I asked in every interview what an ordinary day on the team looked like—and what doing well on a Tuesday afternoon actually meant. That question came from CITIC. It steered me away from at least two roles that sounded like research on paper and were not.

A role occupies one line on a résumé and many ordinary Tuesdays in a life. Recognizing a bad fit early costs less than enduring it for the line. I would rather say that I noticed and acted than polish three weeks of miscellaneous work into a tidy two-month internship.