e-Financial Careers has run a good feature throught the summer - 2008 intern diaries.

It's essentially a series of entries from interns across different areas of finance over the course of the summer. Given that it's the end of internship season, it's a good time to have a read. There's the trader who's just received an offer, the banking intern who calculated that they earn less than minimum wage on an hourly basis, and various others.

These accounts seem pretty aware of the relative pitfalls of what they're doing, although there's not much appreciation of the alternative options that exist, within or without finance, and there's little idea discussion of what lies two years ahead. Many of the top gradutes among their peers will look towards parallel careers in private equity, hedge funds, venture capital, investment management, etc.

As ever, top graduates have more options than they think...