Three weeks at a CITIC Securities branch office

Summer between sophomore and junior year. I'd applied for a research-track internship at CITIC Securities because the name on the door is one of the largest investment banks in China and I wanted to see how the research desks worked from the inside. What I got, when I showed up in July 2022, was a Shenzhen branch office.

What the work actually was

A branch office is not a research desk. The team's job, day to day, was customer-facing:

• 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
• Internal admin — calendar coordination, document filing, the kind of work where you measure your day in fields filled, not questions answered

The metric the team optimized was AUM brought in. The skill the team rewarded was how to walk a client from interested to signed without losing them in the middle. That is a real and respectable skill. It is also not what I wanted to be learning when I'd told my school I was going to spend two months at a Chinese investment bank.

Why I left after three weeks

Two reasons, in honest order.

First, the gap between what the role had been advertised as and what the role actually was. The institution was the same — the building, the badge, the email domain. But "investment bank" covers a wide span of work, and a branch office's sales floor is a long way from a sell-side research bullpen. By the end of week two it was clear I would not learn any of what I'd come for, and that staying out of politeness was wasting both my time and theirs.

Second, the COVID context. Shenzhen in summer 2022 was managing recurrent lockdown risk; the office had its own contingency protocols. With limited learning upside and a non-trivial probability of being stuck in a hotel quarantine for a week, the math on staying didn't hold up. I gave the team a clean handoff and went home.

Why I'm leaving this entry on the site

It would be easy to drop CITIC from the timeline and pretend the gap was a long July. I'm leaving it in because the lesson it taught me has compounded.

What I learned, very specifically, is that research-track and sales-track are two different jobs that share a lobby. The org chart calls them both "the firm." The day-to-day work, the metrics, the people you sit next to, the questions you spend your hours on — those are not transferable. When I was applying for SIPA-era internships I asked, every single time, what does the team's day actually look like — what does success on a Tuesday afternoon look like? That question came directly from CITIC. It saved me from at least two roles that on paper sounded like research and were not.

A bad fit, caught early, is cheaper than a bad fit you ride out for the line on the resume. I'd rather show that I noticed and acted than file three weeks of dirty work as a clean two-month internship.