Sales and Trading Summer Associate

MBA on campus recruiting is very formal and identical across all the bulge bracket banks: initial on campus presentations begin soon after the school year starts and it is followed by a networking session. At this point the sessions are open to everyone. You have little networking circles develop and try to impress the company representatives with good questions an find people with common backgrounds with which to make a connection. Thank you emails are sent the following morning. Now the dance begins. I made sure to follow up with people I thought I made a good impression on and asked for the opportunity to come in for informational interviews. I also made sure to keep the HR recruiter in the loop. After the first or second on campus event, subsequent events are held off campus and are invitation only. The invite list gets shorter for each subsequent event while the events become more and more personal (for example, by the last event it's small dinners with a 1:1 ratio of employees to candidates). The goal is to make the final list of first round on campus interviews. I was able to form a good relationship with a few people and one of them happened to be the interviewer for the first round of interviews so it was a casual chat versus an interview. That got me into the final round super day interviews. The first interview for my super day started with the interviewer saying e didn't feel like asking questions and that I should interview him. This is actually the second time I've had that happen in a super day (the other time being at credit Suisse). He was an oil trader which is a market I follow closely so we had a long but good conversation about that. The next and last interview (only 2 interviews for their super day) was a disaster. First, the interviewer asks me to sit in a seat which was clearly not functioning right as it would either lean too far back or you had to sit with your elbows on the table to hold yourself up. The first question he asked is what I read to keep up on markets and he wanted to know specific sections. For example, when I said I read the economist he said which of te editorials I liked the best and when I said which ones he asked me what the most recent one was about. Next came generic questions about whether I wanted to do sales and trading and why (followed by generic answers by me). Then came a lot of technical questions related to how a movement in interest rate affects different asset classes. One question was specific to in what kind of environment would equity markets continue to rally while the Fed is raising rates.