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How do you feel about the i-bank that gave you your first job?
 

Dumbeldore3000's picture
(Monkey, 30
 
Points)
 on 4/18/12 at 12:27pm

We're now enjoying life at a private equity, venture capital or hedge fund, or perhaps we're in business school or have moved on to start a company or even gone corporate.

What we have in common: We did our time as analysts in bulge bracket investment banks.

Now how do we feel about it? We acquired great hard-skills highly sought after in the world of high finance, worked on multi-million and billion-dollar deals, got doors of competitive follow-on job opportunities wide-opened for us, etc...

Yet, when I see bad news about Citigroup, I want to point a finger and laugh like Nelson Muntz in the Simpsons. It's more than a "I got out before sh*t went down"-feeling, since I was there when things were at their worst. I liked my team and its people, had no problem working nights and weekends to get stuff done, went through a surprisingly good amount of dealflow, and got a positive experience overall. But Citigroup as a whole is such an easy monster to despise. Large, impersonal, as agile as a glacier, and clumsily managed by what is probably the leadership with the highest turnover on the Street in recent history.

How do you, other former bulge bracket analysts, feel about your brand-name-first-employer as a whole? What is your gut feeling when you see its logo? Or its name in the news? I feel that, with all the upside I got from the job, I should feel more positively about the whole entity, yet it's the exact opposite.

Tags:
eriginal's picture

I'd be interested to read a

AM
 
Points)
 on 4/18/12 at 1:32pm

I'd be interested to read a thread like this, but I really don't think there are enough people on this forum that have actually completed 2 years at a bulge bracket bank to really comment.

"One man with courage makes a majority." — Andrew Jackson

Pike's picture

I'm interested as well..Hope

IB
 
Points)
 on 4/19/12 at 3:47pm

I'm interested as well..Hope people actually respond

Good is the enemy of Great

CompBanker's picture

I didn't work at a

PE
(Almost Human, 8,508
 
Points)
 on 4/21/12 at 10:17am

I didn't work at a bulge-bracket bank, but I'll share anyways. Given I moved from MM IB to MM PE, I still have very regular interactions with my MM bank as we frequently bid on their companies. As silly as it may sound, I'm still quite proud to have "graduated" from the analyst program. This pride is similar to the pride people have in their undergrad institutions. Let's be honest -- getting through two years of IB can be challenging, and you make a lot of great friends along the way.

One thing that has been a disappointment for me is that over time, the high turnover in the industry means many of your former colleagues will change firms. Investment banking is a "people" business. As the names and faces at my former IB bank change, I definitely feel less attached. I suspect this feeling will only continue to grow as more and more people leave. On the flipside -- many of these people tend to stay within the "deal industry," so my network has grown itself through no effort of my own. It's always tremendous fun to run into your former colleagues at conferences or just doing deals in general.

CompBanker

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