Military to Finance

Are you looking for recommendations on what B-school you should attend, or what firm/position you should be looking for?

Looking more for firms/positions.

From your description of what you like, it sounds like Wealth Management would be a good fit. You have a good resume, and would have a lot of options, so I'd only do the PWM thing if it truly is your passion. You would certainly have more exit options if you went the IB or S&T route, but if sitting in front of a computer screen for 20 hours a day and banging on excel isn't your passion, you might just end up hating life.

Just my $.02

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Either you sling crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot

what's stressful about Wealth Management?

What's the path for getting into wealth management? Do you normally do a couple years in IB or S&T first?

No. I'm not trying to criticize people's professions here, but in general, if you do IB or S&T then you are really over-qualified for PWM. The move to PWM will be a step down (the vast majority of the time) in pay, prestige, and complexity (especially from S&T to PWM).

Private banking and wealth management are simply lower on the food chain within the bank, on average. That said, some firms, like UBS, are putting such a focus on wealth management that they are building out structured products desks within wealth management that are usually comprised of people coming over from the investment banking side. The selling point is usually that the work/life balance is generally better (although that is highly dependent upon your comparison point), and that you "don't always have a gun to the back of your head", i.e. better job security.

The trade off is that you will spend the bulk of your time with less complex products and smaller deals because you are usually servicing either retail clients or very small institutional clients. In addition, 9 times out of 10 the pay will be much lower. In the past some private banks had an eat-what-you-kill mentality than allowed them to get paid well (picture the Bear Stearns "brokers" you read about on Bloomberg getting $2-3 million comp packages--good pay, but definitely lower in prestige, exit opps, etc. than the guys in IB or S&T). But many banks are now moving to a different Private Banking model that is much more collaborative and team-oriented, which in turn improves the culture/work-life balance, but cuts even further into your pay.

Dont' get me wrong--private banking and PWM are great career fields and can be very lucrative, but they are very different in many aspects from IBD and S&T (which are in turn very different from each other, as well). Each of the 3 career fields will attract very different types of people with different goals.

Definitely agree with Skins1.

Even in the Asset Management subset, Private Banking takes a backseat to the Institutional Investment Management, with PWM being the bottom of that totum pole in terms of pay/prestige/exit ops at a junior level.

I certainly appreciate all of your inputs on wealth management. From my very brief description of myself, are there other ibanking fields you all would recommend?

Honestly, don't sweat it to much right now. Go to b-school and figure it out there. Once you get to b-school you will have the opportunity to meet people from every imaginable background, and you'll learn a lot more there than you will on this board. In addition, full-time recruiting starts about 1 month after you get to school--you'll learn a ton during recruiting.

That said, do NOT spread yourself too thin. You can wait until school starts to figure out what you want to do, but you need to be sure you at least limit your focus rather quickly. Very, very few people successfully do recruiting for S&T, IBD, and consulting and still land job offers. You usually need to limit it to 1 or 2 core areas. And as far as firms are concerned, don't worry about that. That will work itself out in the end, and firm choice is very dependent on you chosen career field, chosen team/desk, etc.

Good point about the firms skins. I'll just let it ride. Only thing is I'd like to have my career goals a little more solidified for my bschool app. Unfortunately,being in the military I don't get a chance to interface with any investment bankers, etc. so I don't have too much detailed insight into these fields.

Don't worry too much about that, either. Just pick a story/goal and stick to it. Also, ad coms fully understand that people coming from "non-traditional" backgrounds are going to have a general career change as their main goal.

When I was doing apps I thought I wanted to doing consulting, since the vast majority of vets in b-school do consulting. So that's what I wrote in my essay. Then everything changed and I switched to S&T. Ironically, I was the only military vet at my school that went into S&T, and one of only a handful that did finance at all. The rest of them were M/B/B for consulting.

And the funny part about this was that all the other vets avoided S&T with a general attitude of: yes, I know I can make more money there than in IB or consulting, but it's too risky. Coming from a bunch of combat vets, go figure.....

Thanks skins. I'll pick one career field and stick to it in my essays. What branch of the service were you in and where did you go to biz school? Did you go through recruiting for ibanking and consulting while you were in business school?

I was pretty much set on S&T by the end of the first semester. I did go to a few info sessions on consulting, but I never pursued it. For IB and S&T you spend the first few months of schools going to info sessions (all on campus) that were bank-wide, and then going to S&T specific cocktail hours/info sessions, then doing 1 trading floor visit per bank, etc. All that will fill up your schedule very quickly. Then add trading simulations or lectures hosted by banks on campus, and a few other events, and basically you're slammed through the winter break.

So S&T and IB recruiting is very heavy on the meet and greet on the front-end, and then you spend the last few weeks before interviews just studying and prepping for technical questions. Consulting recruiting, on the other hand, is very heavy on the back end--you have much more free time early on, and then the last month or so you are prepping non-stop for the case interviews. So because the timing is different, I have seen people do both. But it's very hard, and most people just end up spreading themselves too thin and getting no offers. So it's better to focus on one area--that's the way to land multiple offers and give yourself the best chance (caveat that current job market conditions are obviously a huge player--I graduated during the boom so it was quite different from the situation now).

Standby for an email.

Are you in Sales or Trading? I'm sure you can indicate preference, but how does the decision on where you end up get fleshed out by your firm?

Also, people talk a lot about "exit options" being good from S&T. What options are these (looking for examples)? I suppose most would be interested in sticking w/ a finance/Wall Street oriented role thereafter, but do people go into corporate jobs after S&T, say, in the industry they focused on during trading (e.g. industrials, transportation, etc.)?

I ask about exit options b/c although IB-type jobs interest me, I worry that it is due more to the mystique of the Street and pay than to a genuine interest in the role these positions play in the economy. I know my initial-impressions of the industry (from reading only) as a glorified middle-man are not unique or original, but it bothers me a bit that I may not feel like I'm adding useful value. I think S&T would give me a deep understanding of financial markets (and an excellent pay check), but if the initial attraction wore off after a few years, what are the ways you can capitalize on that experience and skill set?

I'm starting business school this fall and have been furiously investigating IB careers. But like the OP, I'm currently in the military and have little exposure to former professionals (other than a couple people I met during admit weekend).

Thanks for any input you care to provide.

Very good questions, but also somewhat difficult to answer. The bottom line in all of this is that each area of finance is very different and each attract different personalities. IB and PE and very similar, while S&T and HF are very similar. In turn, each of those 2 groups, contrary to what many people think, are very different from each other.

In IB and PE you tend to focus on certain industries and companies, and in turn one of the exit opps is going into industry. For S&T (with the exception of commodities) going into industry is not really a viable exit opp. That said, no one I know in S&T would have any interest in working in industry in the first place, so that lack of an exit opp is irrelevant. S&T tends to be much more macro and quant than IB, which in turn somewhat limits your exit opps to HF or other finance positions. That said, exit opps are much more important for IB, since so few people will ever make that a long-term career. S&T, on the other hand, is often chosen as a permanent career for people, especially because these days it is so varied, especially on the sales and structuring side. Trading tends to be a little more limited because it is much more specialized.

As far as choosing between sales, trading, and structuring, it depends on the bank. The trend seems to be that for your summer internship you do both, and can rotate on multiple desk in any of the 3 main positions. For full-time, however, most banks will request that you choose sales, trading, or structuring, and specifically interview for one. That said, it is very possible to interview for and get an offer in 1 area, but then switch once you actually start working (doesn't happen often, but I have seen it, sometimes because the person wanted to switch and sometimes because the bank forced them to). Bottom line is that you will be the one to choose which role appeals to you most. And a side note--if you go for a structuring role you can often switch a few years down the road, if desired, into either sales or trading. People often leave structuring because the hours on many desks can be as bad as in IB, and to be honest, structurers get sick of sitting there all night after salespeople and traders (especially traders, since they work the shortest hours of all 3 groups) but getting paid the same pay. Structuring to trading seems to be a more typical route, but on many desks these days structuring is actually a part of sales, so that route is becoming more and more common.

Hope my rambling helps...

skins,

I'm military looking to career-switch into S&T, preferably trading. From which b-schools is this possible? I've heard that I need to attend a quant school such as Wharton, Chi, or CBS to make this happen. I've also heard that any top-15 will do. What do you think? How much harder would it be to break into S&T from schools such as Tuck, Johnson, or Yale?