My experience

Overview

Willamette does a lot of valuation work (they also do testimony, forensic, opinion, etc.) and as an intern you will almost certainly be helping with only valuation work. This generally means the deliverable is a valuation report of anywhere from 30-150 pages for each client. These reports (not specific to just Willamette) almost always include background on the client or entity, the industry, the valuation methods, DLOC or DLOM, legal jargon, etc. As an intern you get to write a lot of those sections, or copy if they are prewritten and nonspecific to the client. Unfortunately you don't get much freedom when writing deliverables. You have to write according to legal standards and internal style guides which is challenging for freethinker, new interns, but it does create a very professional deliverable you will be proud of. Aside from writing client deliverables I also was able to write a research article, which involved much more freedom and allowed me to work with a managing partner. Aside from writing, an intern will also be asked to review documents submitted by the client to learn, generate questions for diligences, and to get a background sufficient enough to understand the valuation itself. Interns will also be asked to "spread" models. Please understand that this does not mean that you are building the valuation models, you are simply inputting years of financials. While it might not be as exciting at first cause you don't get to build your own DCF, it is important to realize three things. First, the model the intern would've build would be fraught with errors and getting to work with an existing model is actually a learning experience. Second, models are always tweaked with reason, so there will be a time later down the road where you get to understand the numbers and how they should change the model. Finally, "spreading" is essential and not always easy because every client does their financials differently, so spreading can sometimes be a challenging puzzle in the moment. You also do a lot research (industry, company, comparable transactions, etc). Writing, spreading, and research made up the majority of my day to day work. There was the occasional "pls fix" where you would be asked to adjust others work to a style guide. Finally, there were also times where I got to code to tackle really difficult intangible valuation problems and process client data. Coding is by no means an expectation of the job but it was an enjoyable tangent to my everyday work as an intern. Overall, you get to work with a lot of clients in a short amount of time since you can be staffed on multiple projects at once as an intern. (I worked on over a dozen clients over a summer) So you get a lot of very interesting exposure.

This is a tremendous learning experience of an internship. I highly recommend for sophomores and juniors looking for an internship. The biggest perks of the job were learning how all the models work and getting to work on so many clients in a short period of time. Given the nature of valuations you are handed the financials and dirty details of private companies you've never heard of and billion dollar private companies that everyone wishes they knew more about. You get an inside look at some pretty interesting things. My biggest drawbacks for working with Willamette were that I didn't get to know the team as well as hoped (although with COVID that is out of their hands) and that they operate in a very specific niche. By the way, this is a 40-50 hour work week type culture.