2019 Investment Banking Full Time Recruiting - Do I Have a Chance?
I'm a non-traditional student, attending a non-target school, with a GPA of 3.49. I participated in some SA interviews this past season with JPMorgan, CITI, BoA, and Goldman, along with some smaller regional banks, but unfortunately nothing came of any of them. The only option I see from here is to read and study this summer and prepare myself for full time recruiting in the Fall and Winter. What should I do to prepare myself for the full time interviews, if I'm lucky enough to get one?
Didn't know Rosenbaum and Pearl also wrote a book about baking.
Man... I hate to break it to you, but maybe you should prioritize another career path for the time being.
For some background, I also went thru FT recruiting for IB, also non-target. I had a 3.7 GPA, double major with engineering, 2 boutique IB internships and a $20B PE fund internship, hundreds of hours networking & MD referrals, and I still an INCREDIBLY difficult time getting my offer. Even had a very tough time at MMs, where I was at superdays with 5-10 equally qualified people for 1 spot.
All the bulge brackets, aside from a couple, had absolutely no FT openings at all. I recall a couple pretty senior guys pushing hard for me and HR maintained they were hiring 0 FT analysts because they got everyone they needed from the intern pool. FT recruiting is so much harder than SA recruiting because the pool of candidates hasn’t materially shrunk but there are only a handful of spots open at MMs and maybe 1-2 at a larger BB/EB, if that. You can be very qualified, do everything right, and still not get a FT offer at anywhere besides a small boutique.
The fact of the matter is you go to a non-target, your GPA isn’t that great (especially for the bloodbath that FT recruiting is, where 3.7+ is the norm) and you have no internship for this summer (massive red flag). Your first step here is finding something, anything to intern at. Telling someone that you just studied your junior summer is not going to cut it, 0% chance.
If you’re really set on getting into IB, it’s going to be thru a regional boutique with 10-25 people, and really pounding their door down hard.
Typical wall street oasis user who likes to put his career on a pedestal and make things seem harder and worse than it actually is. Could u have found the process difficult because you werent as polished as you were when u got the offer? Perhaps u werent as sharp on your technicals early on? No offense but to me a post like this comes across as an ego massage and offers no help or benefit but to discourage OP who is perfectly qualified. This and your AMA post. It seems like as opposed to helping people you come to seek validation on your offer.
I agree that it will be tough to break into, but you did it why cant he? Neither of you guys had much relevant experience With comments like these op immediately feels unconfident to the extent that he wont even try. Why not be positive and supportive of someone in your shoes last year?
Op: if you network your tail off anything is possible. Try to find something relevant to do paid or not this summer. Best of luck
If I was seeking validation, I would have been one of the guys who changed my LinkedIn to "Incoming investment banking analyst" or posted one of those "Happy to announce..." posts on LinkedIn/FB etc. Quite frankly, I think you'd have to be quite desperate to stoop to the level of trying to impress undergrads on an anonymous forum for a feeling of validation.
The reason I post is because the FT recruiting process is not very well documented on this forum in comparison to SA recruiting, and what information there is available is outdated as the dynamics of the FT process has changed substantially in the past couple of years. Being someone who went through the process, I feel obliged to share the experience I had in hopes that it will be beneficial to someone who was in my shoes, feeling completely in the dark about what to expect from FT recruiting. I think a lot of people (myself including) go into it thinking it will be similar to SA recruiting, which quickly turns out to not be the case. Understanding that you're dealing with a different beast goes a long way in developing a recruiting strategy.
The intent of the post is not to discourage; in fact, I want to make sure people DON'T get discouraged. The reality is even highly qualified candidates who do everything right can have a tough time in FT recruiting, and people seeing anecdotes from individuals like myself and others will (hopefully) understand that it's just the difficult nature of the FT process, and they don't lose confidence in themselves & start thinking maybe it's something wrong with them. If people are discouraged just because something is going to be difficult, then perhaps this is not the industry for them to be going into. It's not just me saying this either; you can look at the FT recruiting thread from last year and see everyone echoing similar sentiments.
Furthermore, the purpose of the thread was for OP to ask whether he had a chance; I provided my honest opinion. I would hardly quantify a 3.5 at a non-target with no junior year internship as "perfectly qualified". IB recruiting (especially FT) is basically a full-time job in and of itself - it would be negligent to encourage a low return on investment course of action when there are many perfectly good related positions like corporate development, corporate strategy, TAS at Big 4, valuation shops, even consulting which would provide possible entries into banking via laterals or an MBA. And, like I mentioned at the end of my initial post, you can obviously network into smaller regional boutique banks as well. I wanted to ensure OP had tempered his/her expectations when going into the process. There's nothing wrong with shooting for the best possible opportunity, but time is a finite resource and you sometimes have to be pragmatic about your choices.