Would interning at the Department of Treasury improve my chances to get me into a finance school

Answered

Interning at the Dept of Treasury is impressive and I feel college admissions officers would take notice of it whether you applied for as a Business School Undergraduate or towards a major in Public Policy, Political Science or Military academy like Westpoint, the Citadel or USAF Academy.

I want to make 2 clarifications.

1.) There is no such thing as a Finance School. Finance is a major, just like Accounting, Operations Research or Statistics. There are both Undergrad and Graduate business schools where you can get an MBA or MPA, or MS is business subject like accounting. If you look at Poets and Quants, you will see a list of the top undergrad business schools and none of them are called Finance schools. MIT, UPenn and Harvard have business schools but Harvard is only a liberal arts college for Undergrads, you can't get a degree majoring in Finance at Harvard. Course 15 at MIT is an undergrad track as you can study Finance as a major at the Wharton School at UPenn.

2.) Second, your mentioned internship involved Finance however most Finance majors aspire to be the Treasury Secretary after a 20-25 year tenure on Wall Street at an Investment Bank like Steve Mnuchin did at Goldman Sachs. Finance majors either want to be investment bankers or quant traders. If you feel you have a knack for trading, then the opportunities for undergrads that graduate with finance degrees is to work on a trading floor trading anything from commodities, energy, stocks, bonds, OTC derivatives or other instruments. To be a trader, you have to be really good at math and programming since you are going to construct your own models. So you'll have to take stochastic methods, martingales, and know every multi-factor option pricing model. The point I'm making is that there is not practical application for your type of internship in 99% of the jobs that finance majors apply for out of business school unless they aspire to work for the Department of Treasury which in all honestly is not a super lucrative or creative place for 20 something millennial that pines to live in a Tribeca loft with a model girlfriend spending weekends in the Hamptons. (Think of the show Billions, and you get the picture).

I do think it's a terrific EC and you should be proud for having had the opportunity to do so. (oh wait, I forgot you just read about this and actually didn't do it yet, so scratch that.)

It would be way more impressive if you got an internship at an Investment bank or Trading company for the summer and learned how to use the Bloomberg terminal or Thomson/Reuters terminals and understood what was going on and familiarized yourself with the capital markets. These are things you are going to have to do in business school labs anyway.

Good luck applying to business school.