Houlihan Lokey

Houlihan Lokey runs a single 10-week Summer Internship Programme each year, from June to August, alongside a longer off-cycle route:

• Summer Internship (US): 10 weeks, June to August, in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, for college juniors and first-year MBAs; interns complete a week-long training programme before joining a business team.
• Summer Internship (Europe): 10 weeks, June to August, based in London, aimed at penultimate-year students, with the same week-long training start.
• Off-Cycle Internship: three to six months, run from most non-US offices, open to undergraduates, MSc and MBA students and recent graduates.

Successful summer interns are invited back as full-time Financial Analysts or Associates the following year. The summer programme is one fixed 10-week block, so a penultimate-year student is committing a whole summer to a single firm for that conversion shot; the off-cycle route is the realistic entry point for anyone applying outside the penultimate-year window.

It was also the top-ranked M&A advisor and the leading global distressed-debt and restructuring advisor (83 deals in 2025), and the top global M&A fairness-opinion advisor across 2001 to 2025 (1,170 opinions). Independent league-table reporting corroborates the deal-count and restructuring leadership. The distinction for a junior is volume over size: the firm runs more deals than larger banks with comparatively small deal teams, so analysts touch live transactions early, and because the restructuring franchise is counter-cyclical it keeps hiring when M&A-only shops slow – worth weighing when a limited number of applications has to be prioritised.