How to Make an "Irrelevant" Internship Look Relevant on Your Resume

You spent a summer somewhere that wasn't a bank — a corporate finance team, a wealth management firm, a consultancy, maybe something with no finance in the title at all. Now you're staring at investment banking applications convinced that experience is dead weight, that it doesn't count the way a boutique M&A internship would.

It counts more than you think, and the reframe that unlocks it is this: relevance is a choice, not a fact. The problem is almost never the experience itself. It's the framing. What follows is how to take an internship that isn't obviously IB or PE material and make it read as relevant: by surfacing the finance-adjacent work you actually did, packaging it with the right label, framing the top line, and then building the substance to back it up.

"Relevant" Is a Choice, Not a Fact

Before we get tactical, you need to understand why relevance is worth engineering in the first place. There are two gatekeepers standing between your resume and a first-round interview, and both of them reward relevance.

The first is human. Recruiters and bankers are assessing your candidacy, which is really just your fitness for the role. Your resume's main job is to convey what you're capable of, your technical skillset, through the lens of your past experiences, and the bullet points describing what you actually did are the heart of that. So the logic is simple: the more relevant your bullet points are to the role, the higher your perceived candidacy, and the more likely you are to make the first-round shortlist.

The second gatekeeper is a machine. Larger firms, bulge brackets especially, use Applicant Tracking Systems: software that "grades" your resume before a human ever sees it. Reviewing tens of thousands of resumes by hand is a poor use of a firm's resources, so an ATS scans for keywords, usually drawn from the job description, and rejects any resume that falls below a relevance threshold. That threshold is brutal: it will likely reject more than 90% of applicants. Only the resumes that clear it get passed to humans for the first-round shortlist.

Find the Transferable Work

So where does constructed relevance come from? It starts with an honest inventory of what you actually did, looking specifically for the activities that mirror the day-to-day work of an analyst.

Even if your internship had nothing to do with deals, you almost certainly touched at least one of these:

Industry Research, Information Database construction, Financial Analyses / Modelling, Strategic Evaluations, Equity Research

These are exactly the activities you should be calling attention to, especially if you lack obviously relevant work experience. Think about what each one really is. Industry research is the same skill you'd use sizing a market for a pitch or a screen. Financial analysis and modeling is the core analyst muscle. Strategic evaluations, weighing one option against another, is what a team does when it assesses alternatives on a mandate. Building an information database is comp-set and tracker work by another name. Equity research is fundamental analysis, full stop.

Notice what you are not doing here. You're not claiming you worked in investment banking. You're surfacing the parts of your real job that happen to be the same underlying skill. That distinction is everything, and we'll come back to it when we talk about confidence.

Surface It With "Selected Project Experience"

Once you've found the transferable work, you need a way to make it impossible to miss. That's what the "Selected […] Experience" label is for.

The label is a device for calling attention to specific components of an experience: transactions, projects, reports, really anything you're proud of or that can serve as a basis for your candidacy. The two most common versions are Selected Transaction Experience and Selected Project Experience. Two others come up often: Selected Research Experience, usually for equity-research work, and Selected Portfolio Company Experience, usually for private equity internships. Use only one label per experience. If your projects aren't all the same type, don't concatenate two labels with an "&" or stack two separate lines. Just opt for the more general term, "Projects."

Most people think of these labels as a way to spotlight work that's already obviously relevant. But the more powerful use, and the one that matters most for you, is the opposite: using the label to call attention to work that a busy professional would otherwise skim right past because it doesn't look relevant at first glance.

Here's the example that makes it click:

For example, during your Financial Analyst internship at a small- or mid-cap company you're tasked with industry research on a new healthcare vertical. You compile your findings, build a presentation and deliver it to your managers. This piece of work is very similar to what you'd do in Investment Banking or Private Equity but it's not a "transaction." In this case, we'd want to use "Selected Project Experience" to call attention to this project.

Industry Research, Information Database construction, Financial Analyses / Modelling, Strategic Evaluations, Equity Research, etc. — these are all activities you should call attention to, especially if you lack relevant work experience, as it essentially turns an irrelevant internship into a (more) relevant one.

That last line is the whole game. The label doesn't change what you did. It changes whether the reader notices it.

Mechanically, it's straightforward. The "Selected Project Experience" line sits inside the relevant experience. Directly under it goes a one-line contextualizer for the project itself. Below that go the bullet points describing what you did, indented to a different list level than the contextualizer above them. The effect is that a single internship now visibly contains a named, self-contained project that reads like analyst work.

That's the power of the label. It lets you present a project in a more sophisticated, organized way. It gives you room to elevate the perceived relevance of the experience. And it makes it far easier to demonstrate that you have the technical skillset the role demands.

Frame the Top Line

I just mentioned the one-line contextualizer. It deserves its own treatment, because it's the line that sets the reader's expectations for everything beneath it.

A contextualizer is the first bullet of any experience. Its job is to give the most general description of the internship and, in one line, a clear idea of what you did throughout it. For a professional experience, you want to capture:

• Duration of the internship
• Team, group, industry, or geography
• Organization description, business model, or AUM

There's a simple formula for it:

Now watch how that works for roles that aren't investment banking:

Completed a 32-week internship on the Finance and Corporate Development teams of Canada's largest digital health platform

Completed a 16-week internship with [Firm Name]'s Corporate Finance team

Completed a 16-week internship at a Canadian wealth management firm with an IIROC advisor with ~$200mm in AUM

Completed a 12-week internship on the Financial Advisory team of a boutique retail-focused consultancy

Completed a 16-week internship with [Firm Name] focused on acquiring and building VMS providers

Completed a 32-week internship evaluating M&A opportunities within the Industrial Automation sub-sector

Look at what each line does. It leads with the most finance-adjacent framing available: "Finance and Corporate Development teams," "Corporate Finance team," "Financial Advisory team," "evaluating M&A opportunities." None of these are banks, but every contextualizer foregrounds the analytical, deal-proximate part of the role and lets it set the tone. Then it adds scale wherever scale exists: "~$200mm in AUM," "Canada's largest digital health platform." Magnitude signals seriousness, and seriousness reads as relevance.

This is the same move as the label, applied to the headline of the experience. You're not lying about where you worked. You're choosing which true description leads.

Make Each Surfaced Bullet Read Credibly

Surfacing the work and labeling it gets you noticed. But the moment a reader's eyes land on those bullets, they have to read as credible, or the whole effect collapses. Two habits do most of that work. I'll keep this section tight, because each one deserves a deep dive of its own, but you cannot reposition an internship without them.

The second is quantifying impact. Same move, but pointed at the result rather than the activity. You can quantify three ways: percentages (growth, efficiency, error rates), dollars (transaction value, savings, AUM or fund size), and plain numbers (competitors, participants, deliverables). You don't need to hit every line. Quantifying 60% to 80% of your bullet points is sufficient. And your numbers can be approximate; firms recognize that. As long as you can roughly outline how you arrived at a figure, whatever you compute is acceptable.

Here's both habits at once, on a deliberately unglamorous role:

Before: Assessed client needs and provided personalized services to increase client satisfaction by 75%

After: Evaluating 50+ customer reviews daily to optimize medicine delivery and communicate insights to management; initiated implementation across 5 offices resulting in 75% increase in client satisfaction

The "before" could be almost anyone in almost any job. The "after" shows an analytical mind at work: a concrete input (50+ reviews daily), a deliverable (insights to management), a footprint (5 offices), and a quantified result (75% increase). Nothing was invented. The work was always there. It just hadn't been described at the right depth.

Confidence: Claim What You Touched, Then Earn It

There's one more thing standing between you and a relevant-looking resume, and it isn't a technique. It's confidence.

When I was starting out, I assumed that because I wasn't "hugely" involved in a given piece of work, because I wasn't a "key" member of the team, writing about it would be lying. That instinct is exactly backwards, and it's worth dismantling, because it's the thing quietly holding most students back.

Start here. No intern is ever a "key" member of the team, and firms know it. You're early in your career. Understanding a workflow end to end relies on the same lessons as actually completing it. So the real question isn't whether you were indispensable. It's whether you understand the work.

Two frames helped me internalize this.

The first is going above and beyond. An "average" employee does only what's assigned to them. An employee who goes above and beyond works on what's assigned and on the deliverables their team is handling too. And besides permission from your boss, understanding those deliverables is the only real prerequisite for working on them. So if you limit your resume to only the tasks formally assigned to you, you're effectively admitting you were an average intern. Were you?

The second is a guardrail for the discomfort. If blurring the line between work you owned and work you merely touched makes you uneasy, lean on the right verbs. Words like "supported" and "assisted" let you speak to the meatiest parts of a project without ever claiming you did everything yourself. They're honest and they're effective. Other reliable softeners in the same family: contributed to, assisted with, helped execute.

Then comes the part that turns a bold bullet into a defensible one: you build the substance. This matters most at smaller, hands-on internships, the boutique advisory and search-fund type roles where students often worry they didn't do "enough."

You surely looked at a few companies or industries, did a bit of research for each, and communicated some sort of insight to your manager. Yes, the 2 to 5 hours you spent on that is probably insufficient for a 10/10 interview answer about that piece of work. But so what? Why don't you spend 10 more hours on it post-internship?

That's the entire trick. The work you did doesn't stop being improvable just because the internship ended. So make it concrete:

Before your internship ends, download all the materials relevant to the mandates you want to place on your Resume — CIMs, Sell-side Research, Call Notes or Transcripts, etc. Then, revise those materials, re-tell yourself the story of said mandate, and repeat as many times as possible until you get an interview.

The mindset to carry out of all this is simple. Be confident, and never downplay your experiences. What you did, how well you did it, and how valuable it was are not frozen in place the day your internship ends. You can still go deeper. The only one rooting for you is you.

Bringing It Together

Come back to where we started. When I looked at those upper-years' resumes, I thought the gap between us was experience. It wasn't. The gap was framing, and framing is something you control completely.

Your "irrelevant" internship is full of work that mirrors what analysts do. Find it. Surface it with a "Selected Project Experience" label. Frame the top line to lead with its most finance-adjacent description. Write each bullet a layer deeper than feels natural, with the numbers to back it. Then put in the hours so you can speak to all of it like a banker. Do that, and the internship you were tempted to leave off your resume becomes one of the strongest things on it.