Investment Banking Academy - Scholar Program

Department: Talent Acquisition
- College Program

Employment Type: Programme

Location: Chicago,IL

At Greenwood Project, we open doors in financial services for undergraduate freshmen. We give our scholars three things: social capital, the network that comes from knowing people inside the industry. Academic and technical capital, the training the work actually requires. And aspirational capital, the belief that the seat belongs to you.

This is not a workshop series. Scholars commit to twelve months of training, deliver real work on real deadlines, and finish knowing whether this industry is for them. Many go on to internships and full time offers at our partner firms. All of them leave with a network they did not have before.

This academy trains investment banking. Over twelve months you will prepare yourself for investment banking internships and learn technical skillsets and behavioral skillsets that set you apart.

The training travels, which is the part worth understanding. Private equity, sales and trading, and equity research all recruit on the same technical foundation, and many people reach those seats by starting in investment banking. But the programming here is investment banking, and you should want that.

• Investment banking. The twelve months are built around financial modeling, valuation, and deal analysis.

• Private equity. Buying companies, improving them, and selling them. Most people get there after investment banking, not instead of it.
• Sales and trading. Buying and selling investments for clients in live markets.
• Equity research
  . Studying public companies and forming a view on whether their stock is worth owning.
• Investment management and buy side roles. Deciding where a fund's money should go at asset managers, pension funds, and university endowments.
• Private credit. Lending to companies outside of the traditional banking system.

We are recruiting 125 scholars into the Investment Banking Academy for the 2029 cohort. Across all three Greenwood academies we will select 325.

You are eligible if you are currently a freshman graduating in 2030
. We call this the 2029 cohort because Summer 2029 is the internship you are working toward.

• October 2026 to June 2027 Rolling admissions. Decisions every month. November is the priority round.
• July 2027 Academy begins.
• July 2027 to June 2028 Twelve months of training, from the summer after freshman year through your sophomore year.
• Fall 2028 Junior year internship recruiting season. Greenwood supports you through interviews.
• Summer 2029 The goal: a 10-12 week internship the summer after your junior year.
• Spring 2030 You graduate.

We review applications and make decisions every month from October 2026 through June 2027. You will hear back within 4 weeks of the round your application lands in. Seats fill as we go, so the earliest rounds have the most of them open.

You submit one application for this cohort. Not one per academy, and not one per round. Our Talent & Recruitment team may move you to a different academy than the one you selected if your answers point somewhere else, so you do not need to get that choice perfect.

• Accepted. You are in.
• Deferred. We want to see more before we decide, usually your next term of grades. Your application carries forward automatically and you do not need to submit anything new. You will hear from us about two weeks before the next round of decisions, and again every month until we decide. You will not sit in silence.
• Declined. Final for this cycle. Because this program only admits freshmen, we cannot reconsider you in a later round.

Deferral is the reason you can apply in an early round without taking a risk. If we are not ready to decide, we hold your application. We will not turn you away for applying before your first semester was finished.

Deadlines in this process are real. Once you apply, we will ask you for things on a schedule: transcripts, forms, sometimes an interview time. If you miss those deadlines, your application is declined rather than delayed. We hold this line because the program itself runs on deadlines, and how you handle ours tells us how you will handle those.

Please read this carefully. Internship placements are not…