Application choices
The decisions before an application
- Growth equity requires valuation discipline without assuming the leverage profile or control rights of a classic buyout.
- The strongest research explains why growth can persist, what evidence would disprove the thesis, and what price already assumes.
- Global scope makes local-market research and regulatory context useful, especially when a business model is not portable without modification.
Work, teams and company background
Jump to a section
Compare the offer by team and work
Prestige is not a work description. Before accepting an offer, verify manager quality, actual analyst responsibilities, team placement, hours and travel expectations, location, return-offer mechanics, and whether the role builds evidence for the next step.
Record the compensation unit and paid term separately from any relocation, travel or housing support. Ask about the return-offer criteria and decision date rather than assuming the internship converts to full-time work. An attractive platform can still be the wrong assignment when the actual work does not build the evidence you need.
Match the work to the investment platform
Platform or lens: Growth investing · What it changes for candidate research: Primary and secondary capital in companies with proven demand and large remaining growth runways.
Platform or lens: Sector specialization · What it changes for candidate research: Consumer, financial services, healthcare, life sciences, and technology themes require industry-specific market work.
Platform or lens: Global investing · What it changes for candidate research: Cross-border market structure, local competition, regulation, and expansion assumptions are central to the thesis.
Platform or lens: Additional strategies · What it changes for candidate research: The platform has evolved over time. Confirm current strategy names, including any infrastructure, climate, or credit activities, on the official site.
Investing is only one possible function
- Investment roles. Screening, market work, diligence, valuation, transaction execution, portfolio monitoring, and investment-committee materials. Exact undergraduate access varies sharply by strategy and year.
- Capital formation and investor relations. Fundraising support, client materials, consultant databases, product strategy, reporting, and relationship management. Communication quality and market knowledge matter alongside analytics.
Explain whether growth creates or consumes value
Use a fictional growth company with a customer-cohort table and a simple cash model. Separate new-customer growth from retention and expansion, then ask how much capital is needed to sustain the plan. Compare a fast-growth scenario with a slower but more efficient one. Identify the evidence needed to choose between them. Present the work as an educational underwriting exercise, with no claim of access to portfolio-company records or the firm's actual investment process.
Prepare the output the team would use
- Create a revenue build for a scaled growth company using customers, retention, pricing, and expansion rather than a single top-line growth rate.
- Write a market map that distinguishes structural winners, funded challengers, substitutes, and distribution gatekeepers.
- Prepare an entry-valuation sensitivity showing how returns change when growth, margins, dilution, and exit multiples move independently.
The work sample should be adapted to the target role. A credit team will care more about repayment, documentation, and recoveries; a growth team will care more about retention, market structure, and growth duration; an operating team will expect a diagnosis with implementable actions.
A source-backed recommendation should make the reader able to reproduce the result. Keep an assumptions page, show the sensitivity that changes the recommendation, and identify the information you could not obtain. Submit only work that is yours to share. An anonymized name does not make confidential deal data safe to publish.
Use the interview to test the assignment
Ask which strategy, product or operating problem the intern actually supports. Find out who reads the deliverable, who checks the analysis and whether you will own a defined workstream. For a client-facing function, ask what quality control applies before material reaches investors. For an operating role, ask whether you will diagnose a problem, implement a change or merely monitor a report.
These are diligence questions, not reports of the firm's interview stages. The supplied guide does not establish a role-specific, dated sequence of assessments that should be treated as universal.
Research context
General Atlantic is a global growth investor built around sector specialization, long-duration company building, and underwriting businesses that can compound through substantial expansion.