Help...bleak future. Stay for a 5th year of college?

I'm not sure what to do --I'm a senior recruiting for IBD at my university (top ivy) but so far haven't gotten anywhere...mainly because I have a low GPA (3.0). I do have solid work experience at a BB (that no longer exists therefore I can't go back) in investment management, not IBD. Should I settle for a random obscure place or should I stay for another year and try for IBD at a BB? I could possibly go to a no-name boutique for a summer internship and then recruit full time next year as a 5th year too. How is being a 5th year senior perceived??

I know I'm good enough for IBD at a BB, and I've made several final rounds already, only to be cut ironically because they are still not comfortable with my low GPA which is mainly due to freshman and sophomore year.

What do you guys think I should do to maximize my chances of getting into IBD at a BB or top boutique? I feel like I speak for a lot of class of 2009 kids who are facing a tough job market and don't necessarily want to settle.

Thanks - I really appreciate your input!

 

Once you get the interview, your GPA is a non-issue. Why would they let you through to final rounds and not just cut you at round 1 or not give you an interview at all if they were concerned about your GPA?

 

BB or top boutique with a 3.0? Hate to rain on your parade but it's time to face reality. There are kids I know with 3.8 GPA's and BB IBD summer work experience who aren't even landing interviews this year.

Would recommend against staying for a 5th year - concerns include whether things get even uglier than they are currently. Then you'd be looking at 40K+ down the drain, and comparatively bleaker recruiting prospects. Advice would be to bite the bullet and aim for boutiques that quite Evercore or Greenhill. Even the smaller ones are being bombarded with resumes from experienced bankers nowadays though...so if you're dead set on IBD at a top firm as a long-term option, then plan on getting an MBA.

 

Yea no offense - at a top ivy your competition is pretty intense. I would start looking around at lower level boutiques and MM banks (if you dare), since I think people are being too confident with the number of people the BBs are taking.

 

Matchbox, not quite sure what the "if you dare" comment implies. Either way, jam121, I would strongly advise against delaying your graduation. There are very few, if any, situations where this makes logical sense. I don't believe waiting for an improved job market is one of them. Besides, there are many cheaper, far more interesting paths you could pursue...

~~~~~~~~~~~ CompBanker

CompBanker’s Career Guidance Services: https://www.rossettiadvisors.com/
 

Comp - I was being sarcastic, with regards to the fact that a lot of people don't apply to MM banks, thinking they are subpar experiences or something.

Wasn't ragging on them, as I in fact interned at one and had a great experience....sorry if it came off the wrong way.

 

i suggest that you do not delay graduation. Just because you are unable to get into banking does not mean the end of the world.

Besides, getting into a corporate is a whole lot safer than going to a BB in this environment. I suggest getting a full time job (corp fin/consulting/something with a good name). You can be a lot more certain that your job will be there when you graduate compared to some BB rescinding your offer.

So what I would recommend you do is the following if banking/PE/HF is ur end goal, get into a corp fin/consulting program, bust ur ass for a few years while networking, get a CFA, Series 7&63, if an opportunity comes along in the next year to two years with a good bank or decent private equity fund - take it, otherwise go to bschool after 3-4 years (which will be competitive but ur coming from an Ivy) and then take it from there.

You don't want to be in the position where you bust ur ass to get into Wall Street and once that goes bust, your left without a job and have to start the process all over again.

------------ I'm making it up as I go along.
 

I don't understand why consulting is being considered this safety valve for all the prospective bankers out there. I know for a fact that recruiting numbers are down (for some top firms, significantly so). Have things changed in the past couple of years where consulting is now that much easier to get into? Or are prospective bankers just being delusional?

Also, GPA is much more important for consulting interviews than banking.

ideating:
I don't understand why consulting is being considered this safety valve for all the prospective bankers out there. I know for a fact that recruiting numbers are down (for some top firms, significantly so). Have things changed in the past couple of years where consulting is now that much easier to get into? Or are prospective bankers just being delusional?

Also, GPA is much more important for consulting interviews than banking.

I agree. consulting is just as hard, if not harder to get into.

I think most seniors are just accepting the reality of the job market and taking what they can. I think the plan is to get an MBA a few years from now and try again when the economy is back up.

good luck!

=== http://bankertimes.com investment banking news

 
ideating:
I don't understand why consulting is being considered this safety valve for all the prospective bankers out there. I know for a fact that recruiting numbers are down (for some top firms, significantly so). Have things changed in the past couple of years where consulting is now that much easier to get into? Or are prospective bankers just being delusional?

Also, GPA is much more important for consulting interviews than banking.

My thoughts exactly.

With my career center, most consulting firms have between a 3.3-3.5 minimum GPA requirement while the BB's have a lot of 3.0 minimums (a few don't even have minimum requirements).

And like others said, once you get the interview, your GPA goes out the window.

 

ideating - prospective bankers being delusional, thinking they can get into any career easily. its what they have to do from shitting their pants in this economy.

"There is only one bottom line -- how much money you make."

"There is only one bottom line -- how much money you make."
 
b2:
Ah, the consulting shoulder-chip: always so overt. This is why you don't want to go in that direction...

What shoulder-chip? It's a legitimate question.

I recognize that if I had gone the banking route I would have built a different skill-set, had a different experience, different bonus, go down the rest of the list. At my school, consulting was marginally harder to get than banking but it was so close as to be essentially equal.

b2, I have enough banker friends to jokingly debate consulting vs. banking, I don't need to come on here and do it with a bunch of bankers who take themselves too seriously. Some perceived prestige rankings trumped up by a bunch of over medicated analysts would dictate that bulge bracket banking is the pinnacle of difficulty and the toughest job to get into - anyone who has gone through the grind of on-campus recruiting knows better.

To clarify, I'm not saying consulting is better or worse than banking. Just saying that it's unrealistic to think of it as some safety job that is in desperate need for labor supply.

 

You are unlikely to benefit from a 5th year in undergrad school. What will you learn that will make you more attractive in IB? If you raise your GPA by some small amount, it will not make as big a difference as getting good experience, preferably followed by an MBA, assuming you have learned a lesson and perform better in b-school than you say you did in undergrad school.

Ignore comments driven by chest-thumping "we are the champions" posters. They most likely are at too low a level in any firm, especially BB, to influence whether you later will be hired at an associate level. On the other hand, take into account that you will be competing against many people who can say everything you can say but have the advantage of better credentials. That matters because when we hire, we see a couple of dozen applicants who have similarly superior credentials, so our task as busy people and cognitive misers is to find anything that knocks out some of them. Your GPA did that to you, even post-interview, and your choice of what you do for the next few years could do the same.

So, wherever you go (boutique, consulting, etc.), go to the best in that field so you won't have to make any more excuses of the "even though the firm has a middling reputation, it really is a strong place in which I had the opportunity to learn more than I would have at a top-tier BB." We hear that all the time and either don't believe or care about it. When you get there, do all you can to be put on projects with at least the following attributes: (1) you did something significant, beyond the call of Excel; (2) you can describe precisely what you did; and (3) what you did is similar, if not in scale or sophistication, at least in type, as you would do at a BB or whatever your goal is.

Be realistic but not too realistic. This is a tough business for anyone who lacks either realism or the guts to go for more than a realistic self-appraisal would encourage.

 

GPA can certainly help you earn a 1st round interview, however after that its all about your ability to sell yourself & click with the interviewer and answer tech questions...I know plenty of analysts who have far sub-ivy league degrees and have made it into banking...keep in mind that your resume is simply a "cover" of a book.

 

From the perspective of banking recruiting, it depends on experience however. A guy who delayed grad a year bc he could not get a BB FT offer is going to KILL internship recruiting the next year bc he'll be slaughtering juniors who don't know wtf is up. From a recruiting perspective, he's no different than a guy who did a sophomore rotational program. This is assuming social competence and interview skills.

 
Best Response

Delaying graduation isn't a dealbreaker. You can do this fairly easily. Simply write "Class of 2015" on your resume, or "01/2015" if you prefer listing the month to match the format used most commonly in the work experience section (mm/yyyy).

As long as you aren't applying to a bank that you've already interviewed with in the past, you are fine. Firms who receive your application for the first time won't be aware when you started college or how old you are; to them, you just look like all the other kids applying as rising seniors. As long you aren't applying to a firm where you networked with people (i.e. people reviewing resumes would go "Didn't this kid talk to me last year looking for a summer job?"), a graduation date change isn't a problem at all.

Frankly put, you won't have much chance to change your grades. Your GPA now will be what you apply to internships for this coming summer with. Your only chance is to try to improve it for the full-time hiring process, and that would only be one semester's worth of grades (spring 2014 semester, because your fall 2014/fifth semester grades won't be on your transcript when you're recruiting).

If I were you, I would look into your school's policy on retaking classes; if your school is one that lets you replace the original grade with the new grade (not all schools allow this, mine didn't), I would change all the classes you originally registered for spring 2014 to the classes you got the worst grades in before. If you got all A's this semester, you could markedly improve your GPA in time for full-time recruiting.

As for internships, you have already missed the boat for most formal internship recruiting processes; pretty much all the deadlines for the BBs and elite boutiques have passed. You need to get whatever internship you can this summer. If it's BB IBD, great, gun for the full-time offer. If it isn't an internship you'd like to convert to full-time, you need to prepare for full-time recruiting (which will happen August-October of 2014 for a start date in summer 2015).

I'm not going to go into detail on how to hustle as a non-target and push for the best internship you can, there are more than enough threads discussing that already. The last thing I'll say is that you don't need to register for a full year. You only need a fifth semester, not a full year. That extra semester will delay your graduation and make you eligible for internship recruiting without forcing you to carry the cost of a full extra year. And, in that sixth semester when you aren't taking classes, you can get an off-cycle internship or a random job and just earn cash.

Good luck, hope this helps.

I am permanently behind on PMs, it's not personal.
 
rothyman:
I've had 2 interviews with BBs for FO positions and 1 with a boutique for a research position. NONE of them asked me why I went to school for 5 years. Then again, I did do a Major and a Minor.
Doesn't every school require a major and minor at this point? Or am I mistaken?
Get busy living
 

if you think you can easily make it, stay an extra year if you think you can make it in with some hard work and time, graduate and get an internship if you think it's a long shot, do an msf

sadly, how likely it is you get in depend smostly on whether you got to a target, semi-target, or non-target

 

I don't know if staying an extra year in undergrad ever makes much sense. You risk just killing a year with no real benefit. At this point some internships have already closed but if you could get a summer internship staying an extra year you could probably get one graduating also.

Take the plunge, graduate. Hell, entering the Peace Core or teaching little kids in Thailand might well be better than staying an extra year and ending up with very similar paper credentials to what you would already have. And you would have more fun!

Network, try very hard to get a post-graduate internship, network more, if you can't find anything then do an MFin.

 

I am still calling people recently... So from what I experienced is that many program don't accept master student as a candidate and I am afraid if I will face similar situation since I will no longer be a student which is a requirement for many programs.

 

Firstly, yes, if you are looking for an investment banking job (not sales and trading or other divisions under a certain investment bank), probably you have around zero chance to get into it, just because you have already been a master student.

Secondly, for Hong Kong, you still have chance. Nowadays around 50% of the summer analysts class at BB (the number may change depending on which BB it is) are master students with a broad range of majors. So do not worry too much about your degree if you are going to land a job in Hong Kong.

Lastly, most full-time analysts, no matter in U.S. or Hong Kong, are converted from summer analysts. Hence, most likely you should first get a summer internship at a BB. Most BB requires you to be a penultimate year student, no matter whether your are an undergrad or grad student. There are few BB allow final year student to be considered for their summer analyst. You can connect with your alumni through linkedin and ask them.

 

Is not so much a matter of intellect, especially on the lower levels: hence the theme of this blog, but if you really wanted to distinguish yourself and perhaps prepare for the buy side or something a bit more cerebral, perhaps you'd do it and then take the chance that you'd be in limbo for on-campus recruiting.

 

i cannot express the importance of doing this for you. you have your whole life to work, stay in school for a year, have some more fun AND come out with a trophy degree (masters from a top school).

...especially if you like what you are doing so far towards that degree, you never know what kind of doors this opens 5 or 10 years away. the 2 year analyst program is the least of your worries right now.

 

IMO: Economics is such a better major than economics, generally speaking. The problem comes in that you're not from a target, so the finance background will help you when they grill you on the technicals, where you will need to shine. Whether you major in finance or economics (from Rutgers), you will likely land the interview via networking/alumni, neither of which will likely care whether you did economics/finance. I recommend you major in economics, do a course like dealmaven (for your resume), and master the technicals.

I'm from a non-target school and doubled in economics and another social science. All of my interviews I got through alumni, one was surprised I wasn't a finance major, but I explained myself and showed that I knew the technicals. I opted for a non-IB front-office position at a BB in the end (interned, with FT offer for next year).

 

I'm in the same situation but i would only need to take one additional semester for a econ/finance double major. This would also allow me to grab another internship. Thinking if it's worth it.

 

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MM IB -> Corporate Development -> Strategic Finance
 

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