Switch industries after internship?

I actually wrote this down to ask an alumni, but I sort of created my own answer.
However my question is phrased differently, "For an internship, should I try a different industry, then what I am looking for full time? My answer, "I do not think so, since I would want to obtain my top pick internship industry/position to see if my top pick is really my 'top' pick.

So, yes it might be harder to get back into IB (by the above poster), but if it is not your top choice then I wouldn't try it out. If IB is your top choice of field, then I would go ahead and try to get an internship in IB. If you decide you hate it, then atleast you can go into your next year full force to break into another field, rather then contemplate whether you would have liked it or not.

Sorry I sort of strayed away from your question and expanded on mine. I agree though that you should try to obtain a full time offer from your summer internship, plus absorb as much knowledge and experience from your internship.

I totally agree with what Lepium said. My friends who interviewed for consulting tell me that firms hire more second years than first years - which basically means that they plan to take people who did other things during their summer internships.

Most banks, on the other hand, say that they hope to hire most or all of their full-timers from their pool of summer associates. This means, of course, that there are few if any spots left for people who didn't do banking over the summer. This is especially true during a tough economy. This past year, few banks returned to campus for second years, and here at Darden it seems people had some limited success jumping to another firm after spending the summer in banking, but I don't know of any that joined the ranks after doing something else for the summer. When things are slow, firms are able to fill their needs from their summer class, and those who do get offers are more likely accept. With things are crappy as they are right not, I wouldn't be surprised if virtually zero (can't predict if there will be a crazy outlier) firms came back to hire full time associates next fall.

All that being said, spending your summer at a top MBA destination will give you the most flexibility. MBA recruiters are competing for the same pool of talent, so they will know which firms attracted the best candidates during internship recruiting, and thus are highly selective and have the best talent for poaching. Top firms in Fortune's survey of firms most popular with MBA students includes usual suspects like big 3 consulting firms, bulge bracket banks, Google, Apple, GE, P&G, Microsoft, etc.; and you can some highly selective destinations that were too small to make the survey (PE/VC/HF, especially if they are well known). Spending your summer at one of these places will give you the best chance at switching the following year. So if you can't decide between consulting, banking and general management, it might make sense just to take the internship that offers the best name recognition so you have more options come 2nd year.

Thanks for all of the responses.

A follow-up question...assuming one got a full time offer from his IB internship, would it be possible to switch to S&T within the same firm? Obviously there would have to be solid reasoning for the switch, but it seems that since they, the firm, have selected the candidate as "hirable" that it would be possible. Any opinions?

Tricky. Sales & Trading numbers are a lot smaller than IB, so simply as a numbers game it is trickier. I have seen the other way around done though, so I guess it can't be ruled out.

Oh, and the relationship between IB and S+T is incredibly frosty at best (see Morgan Stanley's history, amongst others). Recruiting is normally entirely separate, and I don't think they really club together on much at all by recruitment.