May 5, 2026
DALLAS, TX, May 5, 2026, Berkman Woods today announced that it will welcome its 2026 summer intern class in early June, marking the third consecutive year of the firm's summer internship program. The program, which launched in 2023, was designed from the outset to give students something the traditional private equity internship model rarely offers: a front-row seat to how deals are actually built from nothing.
"Most PE internships put students in a box, model this CIM, summarize that industry report," said Ron Martinez, Managing Partner of Berkman Woods. "We wanted to create something different. Our interns aren't shadowing. They're in the room."
The Berkman Woods internship is structured around the realities of independent sponsor private equity, a model that differs fundamentally from the traditional closed-end PE fund. Rather than deploying capital from a pre-raised blind pool, Berkman Woods sources, structures, and closes each transaction on a deal-by-deal basis, assembling the right capital stack, equity, SBA, mezzanine, or seller notes, for each specific opportunity.
For interns, this creates an experience with no real equivalent at a traditional PE fund. Each active deal is live, moving, and consequential. Capital partners are being called. LOIs are being negotiated. Management teams are being evaluated. The economics of the deal, the acquisition fee, the management fee, the carried interest waterfall, are being worked through in real time, not in a textbook.
At a traditional buyout fund, an intern might spend their summer building out a sector landscape or running sensitivity analysis on an already-closed deal. At Berkman Woods, that same intern might spend a week building the debt capacity model for an HVAC company in Plano, then spend the following week on a call with a family office in Nashville walking through the deal thesis. The compressed timelines of independent sponsor deals, typically 60 to 120 days from LOI to close, mean there is never a slow week.
The model also teaches something traditional PE rarely emphasizes at the junior level: the economics of conviction. Independent sponsors earn a closing fee at transaction completion, typically around two percent of enterprise value, and carry a management fee against portfolio company EBITDA while actively involved in operations. The carried interest structure, tiered between ten and thirty percent depending on investor return thresholds, is tied directly to outcomes. Interns who understand this structure leave the program with a clearer sense of how aligned incentives actually work in lower middle market deals.
The 2026 intern class arrives at an inflection point for the profession. Generative AI has moved from a novelty to a genuine workflow tool across the M&A landscape. Industry estimates suggest that more than eighty percent of M&A workflows now incorporate generative AI in some form, from deal sourcing and initial screening to CIM synthesis, market sizing, and diligence memo drafts. The timeline for a standard Quality of Earnings process, which once took four to six weeks, is being compressed as AI-assisted document review reduces the hours required to extract key metrics from raw financials.
For interns, this creates a dual reality. On one hand, AI removes the tedium and unlocks higher-judgment work earlier than previous generations of analysts ever accessed. An intern who would have spent three days summarizing a target's competitive landscape can now produce a draft analysis in a few hours and spend the remaining time stress-testing assumptions with senior team members. The expectation bar for what an intern can contribute in ten weeks has risen accordingly.
On the other hand, the same compression that creates opportunity also creates pressure. The routine, repetitive tasks that once served as foundational training for junior analysts, the comparable company searches, the industry overviews, the document management, are increasingly being handled by AI. This means interns who arrive expecting to learn by doing rote tasks will find the floor has shifted. The new baseline is interpretation, judgment, and communication. The question for every intern entering the field in 2026 is not whether they can use AI, it's whether they can use it faster, more critically, and with better judgment than everyone else in the room.
Berkman Woods has incorporated this reality directly into how the internship is structured. Interns are expected to use AI tools as a standard part of their workflow. They are also expected to identify where AI output requires human correction, where model assumptions break down in lower middle market contexts, and where an automated summary misses the nuance that determines whether a deal works.
The 2026 Berkman Woods summer internship is a ten-week, paid, full-time program beginning in early June. Interns work directly alongside the deal and operations team across live transactions, portfolio company initiatives, and internal firm projects. The program is based in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.
Berkman Woods recruits interns from undergraduate and graduate programs with backgrounds in finance, accounting, business, and related disciplines. The firm places particular value on candidates with strong analytical foundations, intellectual curiosity about small business and entrepreneurship, and a genuine interest in the operational side of private equity, not just the deal side.
Berkman Woods is a private equity firm focused on acquiring, building, and growing businesses across the lower middle market and small business segments. The firm operates as an independent sponsor, sourcing and structuring transactions on a deal-by-deal basis in partnership with institutional investors, family offices, and co-investors. Berkman Woods targets businesses in healthcare, specialty contracting, professional services, business services, and niche manufacturing. For more information, visit www.berkmanwoodsco.com.
Berkman Woods
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