Application choices
The decisions before an application
- A credit thesis begins with “how do we get paid back?” rather than an upside narrative.
- Distressed investing is partly legal and process-driven. Enterprise value alone does not determine recovery without security, priority, covenants, and jurisdiction.
- Official memos and insight pieces are useful evidence of investment philosophy, but candidates should apply the ideas rather than quote them decoratively.
Pay & location
Begin with the path to repayment
Create a fictional capital structure and show who receives value under three downside scenarios. Separate the borrower's ability to generate cash from the value available if the plan fails. State which contractual and legal assumptions would require qualified review. The central question is not just whether the enterprise is attractive, but whether the proposed claim is protected at the price and under the conditions described. Keep invented terms visibly hypothetical.
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: Opportunistic and distressed credit · What it changes for candidate research: Capital structure, legal priority, liquidity, catalysts, restructuring, and recovery value are central.
Platform or lens: Private and performing credit · What it changes for candidate research: Business durability, leverage, coverage, covenants, documentation, and refinancing capacity matter.
Platform or lens: Real assets and other strategies · What it changes for candidate research: Property, infrastructure, or asset-backed situations require collateral-specific analysis.
Platform or lens: Relationship with Brookfield · What it changes for candidate research: Oaktree operates within a broader ownership context. Verify the employing entity and reporting structure for each role.
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.
Prepare the output the team would use
- Build a capital structure with debt tranches, collateral, pricing, maturity, covenants, and recovery waterfalls.
- Write a downside memo identifying the first liquidity break, refinancing need, covenant pressure, and plausible restructuring paths.
- Compare a bond trading at a discount with the same issuer’s equity and explain the different payoff, catalysts, and risk of permanent loss.
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
Oaktree Capital Management is a credit-oriented alternative investment manager associated with risk control, contrarian analysis, distressed and opportunistic investing, and disciplined attention to downside.