Inside MiF Internships at Top Firms

Xiaoxiao Li discovered her interest in the power market during adjunct associate professor of strategy Priya Parrish’s Impact Investing class, where she researched renewable energy and grid efficiency in the US for a project. Born and raised in Beijing, Li was particularly interested in differences between how the US and China are approaching the transition to renewable energy—China being more active with regulation. She raised the topic during her interview with Middle River Power (MRP), a Chicago-based investment and asset management platform focused on US power generation, where she interned this past summer.

She landed the internship after her SMP careers coach connected her with an alumnus who’s a manager at the firm. They had an informational call, and soon after, she was invited to interview.

“Connections are quite important,” Li says. “Booth has so many resources. People are so willing to talk with you, to help you, and to network.”

As an intern on the asset management team, Li helped evaluate how MRP’s power plants were performing and positioned relative to regional power market trends. She attended market and asset meetings, compiled reports for financing partners, and contributed to power price analysis for both the existing fleet and the deal pipeline.

With support from senior leaders, Li also worked on a new, long-term project, conducting industry research around MRP entering a new market. She used modeling skills she learned at Booth to build a market model for capacity pricing from scratch. Her summer culminated with a presentation to senior leaders and a discussion on her findings.

“It was a really supportive environment, and I received a lot of guidance to build my idea and refine my model,” she says.

Through her internship, Li honed the skills of independently developing ideas and asking more targeted questions to refine those ideas. After graduation, Li hopes to land an asset management analyst or strategist role in the energy space. “If you want to pursue a career in finance, it’s important to have a specialization,” she says. “Energy is a good industry to give you an edge.”

Luis Alvarado Rodriguez was drawn to Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) for its Chicago Booth roots. The school’s namesake, David Booth, MBA ’71, founded the investment firm more than 40 years ago. He drew on the Nobel Prize–winning research of Eugene Fama, MBA ’64, PhD ’64, the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, to shape DFA’s approach of factor-based, systematic investing rooted in academic financial theories.

Through the Booth network, Rodriguez connected with several alumni who worked at DFA. “They were very generous with their time, helped me understand the firm and the role, and were happy to give me a referral,” he says. “Without that I wouldn’t have been able to interview and get the role.” 

He’s also grateful to Stefan Nagel, the Fama Family Distinguished Professor of Finance, for sharing papers and topics to study that went beyond what he learned in Asset Pricing I and II. “What made that guidance valuable was less the technical content than the framing,” Rodriguez says. “It helped me understand DFA’s investment philosophy, what a research group at a firm like that actually does day to day, and what matters in buy-side quantitative research more broadly. I started the internship with a clear sense of why the questions I was working on mattered, not just how to run them.”

As a quantitative research intern at DFA’s Austin office, Rodriguez researched special-purpose acquisition companies—shell companies that list on the stock market specifically to raise money to acquire another business—and ran simulations to measure how including them would affect an investment portfolio.

“My experience was amazing,” Rodriguez says. “Everyone at DFA was very welcoming, willing to support me throughout my internship, and gave very constructive feedback. They were interested in seeing me succeed.”

Another one of his projects involved looking at what happens when public companies issue additional or already existing shares to raise capital. He built databases in Python and SQL covering several thousand of these offerings globally and measured their characteristics and abnormal returns. He presented findings and recommendations from both projects to senior leaders in the research department.

The internship sharpened his quantitative toolkit, he says, and showed him how the financial concepts he’s studying at Booth get put into practice. “Now, I better understand how these theories and academic papers translate into real-world portfolio construction,” Rodriguez says.

After he graduates from Booth, he hopes to secure a research role on the buy side of the industry.

Kevin Kim’s interest in mortgage-backed securities prompted him to sign up for the course Fixed Income Asset Pricing with John C. Heaton, the Myron S. Scholes Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, last spring. He spent several weeks learning about securitized products—a topic he didn’t have an opportunity to study as an undergraduate, when he majored in business data analytics.

“It helped me understand the domain quickly and to think like a fixed-income institutional investor,” Kim says. The class was the perfect fit ahead of his internship as an investment analyst at Reams Asset Management in Indianapolis this summer. “The course definitely helped me walk into my internship more prepared,” he says.

A Booth alumnus Kim met through the recruiting process connected him with the managing director at Reams. An introductory call led to an internship interview the following day. “My conversation with the MD really inspired me to go into this space because he seemed like a person I wanted to learn under,” Kim says. “Talking to his team, I realized they were very lean and sharp.”

He says the people were a big reason why he chose to do his internship at Reams. “They made sure I wasn’t siloed as an intern. They gave me autonomy; at the same time, whenever I sought feedback or guidance for my summer projects, they were very specific and practical.”

Kim’s day-to-day entailed participating in the firm’s morning investment team research meeting, shadowing trades, and pursuing his own summer project, which involved building a specific GPT workflow in ChatGPT to analyze risk profiles. “I got to present to leadership at the end of my internship, and people really liked the outcome,” he says.

Kim’s Booth coursework and his professors’ encouragement to always ask questions in class (of both them and guest speakers) emboldened him to frequently speak up during firmwide meetings, which significantly added to his learning.

The internship confirmed for Kim that he wants to work in the fixed-income market following graduation. “It was a great opportunity,” he says. “This internship was 10 out of 10.”