Background
I randomly discovered WSO nearly seven years ago just weeks after I secured a FT MM IB position. The website was extremely nascent at the time with only a few thousand registered users. The majority of the users were college students with only a handful of people actually working in investment banking. Like many new users today, I became engrossed in learning as much as I could about banking and spent a tremendous time reading everything on the site.

Throughout my two banking years, I did my best to share my experiences with the community. As one of the most senior members on the site (as an analyst, no less), there were relatively few people who could answer my questions about PE or assist me in building my career. At the time, I felt as though I wasn't getting anything out of the site despite putting a lot of effort in.

Fast forward to my first PE job and I was finally in a position to really mentor people looking to break into banking and PE. I started getting a lot of inquiries from not only college kids, but bankers as well. Luckily PE isn't as taxing hours-wise and I had the time to email/talk/meet with folks and do my best to help them out. I still hadn't seen any tangible benefit from my now 1,000+ hours on WSO, but at least I was having fun.

Below is the second and final part of an interview with WSO Certified User and 2nd year banking analyst 'duffmt6'. Interview conducted by Asatar. See Part 1 Here.

3) Could you describe a typical day on the job?

There isn't really a typical day on the job, but I'll take you through my Wednesday:

8:15-8:45 - Get settled, read some news, have a coffee, catch up on Dealbreaker...basically nothing productive
8:45-9:30 - Made some updates to a model we are providing to our buy side client on one of their targets.
9:30-11:45 - Work on a CIM for a sell side client
11:45-12:00 - Pick up lunch with the other analysts
12:00-1:30 - Update the financials in a different CIM
1:30-3:00 - Make marketing calls for a client we just took to market. I get allocated the crappiest targets and the Director and VP on the deal take the rest. Mostly get voicemails, send out follow up emails and update the CRM.
3:00-4:00 - Phone interviews for SA program
4:00-6:00 - More CIM writing
6:00-7:00 - Listen in on a conference call between a client and a potential buyer going over unaudited year end financials
7:00-8:00 - Type up notes from call and create an info request list for our client
8 pm - VP tells me to go home because I'm pretty sick

Below is the first installment of an interview with WSO Certified User and 2nd year banking analyst 'duffmt6'. Interview conducted by Asatar.

SEE PART 2

1) What is your background and how did you get into investment banking?

I graduated from a top 25-30ish school in 2010 in a quantitative business major (the quantitative portion hurt my GPA a bit - I finished with a 3.65). I had literally no career focus throughout my college career. I was focused on school work, partying and rugby, and not in that order. I lucked into a back office finance internship in my junior year with a well known fin services company through a connection (my cousin) and got a verbal return offer. My senior year I basically missed the boat on full time recruiting, not that I would have landed anything anyways. I interviewed for one consulting position and got destroyed (didn't even know what a case interview was). At that point I had very little concept of what investment banking was - only a couple of my close friends were going into finance and no one in my family was even remotely connected to the industry. I ended up accepting a position in financial control with the company I interned at.

WSO gorillas, apes, orangutans, neanderthals, humans, what have you...Check out the newly added "New User Introductions" Forum - a place where our freshly minted chimps can come to introduce themselves and explain what they're looking for and what they're interested in.

Are you a new user on the site? Welcome! We'd love to hear from you. Up above, hover over the "Forums" header, select "Post Forum Topic" (or just click here), and select "New User Introductions". Don't be shy!

I'm fairly new here, and deciding what to write about in a blog entry might seem easy enough, but I'd rather people enjoy what I read than just read it and forget it. So I spent some time this week going through the more popular posts on WSO, and a good chunk of them revolve around this hilarious concept of being "alpha," and that "slaying hotties" is a badge of honor and the end-game for us guys in finance.

Even the posts about finding a way to be happy are all just about making money and getting ass. I'll chalk it up mostly to the college freshmen that post on this site, but I feel the need to set the record straight about what it really means to be an "alpha male." And it's a lot more simple than people think.. you don't need millions of dollars, a stable of women, or pumped up biceps. So for your reading pleasure, and inspired by previous bloggers, WhiteHat presents "The Alpha Checklist."

I passed a pretty cool milestone last week. Four years ago last week I began writing for WSO. As near as I can tell (this was before we started using the blog format) this was my first post. As you can see, the financial crisis was in full throttle and it was an exciting (and somewhat disconcerting) time to be involved in finance - even as a blogger.

The past four years with WSO have been great, and I have you guys to thank for that. I'm trying to remember back then, but I think we had around 8,000 registered users at the time. Now I think we're over 70,000, and the growth has gone hockey stick. My posts have appeared nearly every day the market has been open, which means I've written over 500,000 words or the equivalent of seven non-fiction books. And I've had a blast doing it.

The most surreal aspect of it all has been the pseudonym. I hadn't originally planned on using a pen name, but Patrick thought it would be a good idea. So we were setting everything up and he asked me what I wanted to call myself. I thought about it a second and told him "Eddie Braverman" because that was the nickname given to me by my buddies when I was in equities, thanks to The Money Culture. I had no idea at the time what a bizarre double-life I was embarking on with that decision.