I’m sure this has been asked before but does anyone a few years into the role have any advice for an incoming MBA Associate? How should we prep and how should we avoid the reputation that MBA Associate usually entails?
Full disclosure: joining a smaller EB this summer after interning there last summer
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My personal opinion, but my two tenets.
1. Learn to be an analyst. You’ll never be as good at being an analyst as an actual analyst but in your first six months, learn to do what they do. In fact do their job and have the analyst check your work. Get halfway serviceable at that and then you can focus on developing beyond that. It astounds me when MBA associates come in with an expectation of avoiding modeling or technical work out of fear or laziness. You can’t check work if you don’t even know what you’re checking for. You also can’t provide leverage if all you are is a passthrough with 0 technical ability.
2. Don’t be a dick to your analyst. Practice patience, have some empathy and respect, and pick up some slack when you can. I can promise you, in your associate years there will be multiple situations where your balls are in the analyst’s hands. If you’re an asshat, you’ll reap what you sow. If you’re a decent human being, they’ll help you out. With that being said, in my experience, there is always that one analyst that is a bit entitled, selfish and has no issues slacking off and dumping their work on the team or other analysts. Feel free to punch a boot through that jerk should you come across them.
One last pro-tip, prior to starting you should spend your time preparing for banking by having a life and doing anything other than thinking about banking. You’ll have plenty of late nights when you’re FT to consider your poor life choices so might as well not add to that list. This is assuming you have a job and the firm successfully vetted you for at least a basic understanding of financial, accounting and valuation concepts.
I was an MBA associate a number of years ago btw
^100%; OP if your internship wasn't terrible, you should have gotten a decent sense of how top associates think and which ones in the group the analysts know they can't slip anything by in their work. I paid close attention.
Plus you probably got to work with the summer analysts you'll be starting full time with and even manage them on engagements you got staffed on. I made a conscious effort to work as a teammate with analysts doing grunt work and not be a delegator; I also praised good summer analyst work in front of the whole team at the end and I think that helped the analysts know what type of associate I'll be. I guess it helps that I learned to manage analysts in my job before banking. Summer end result I think the positive culture helped all of the summer analysts decide to sign their return offers.
I love diving into models and if you don't like it, you better learn to like it! It pisses me off the bad reputation MBA associates have among analysts and I want to change that. It really irked me during recruiting talking to some associates at banks that only worked in ppt and were allergic to models.
Thank you for the replies!
Please take a proper modeling course
Don't treat the analysts like chattel — they probably know a whole lot more than you
You are not above menial tasks, especially if you have time on your hands
Related to the above, if you are going to dump all of the work on the analysts, you can’t throw them under the bus if they fuck up. If you want to put on big boss pants, you better act like one instead of blaming 22 year olds for improper punctuation
Be humble. We are all replaceable
Similar to other comments, I can best summarize it the way another user said it a long time ago or the way Jeff Bezos thinks about Amazon's culture. Come in with the Day 1 mentality. Sure there will be analysts that won't work as hard or maybe looking to leave and not take it as seriously as you, but that's not the standard, they are going through the same struggles you are adapting to the job and putting in the long hours week after week. I know some people say it gets easier as you work for more time, but I don't think that's true as an analyst. The job gets way more boring and more of what you do is a waste of time so just try to make the whole experience pleasant for yourself and whoever you work with.
Regardless, when you start you know nothing. I've found that most analysts appreciate that because they are usually coming out of college and they have no professional experience. I've come across several MBA associates that don't. I'm working with two right now and I like one much more than the other simply because he asks me for my opinion/help on putting things together. Older analysts usually know just ask them. You can tell quickly if whoever you ask is just trying to dodge work but otherwise, they've been doing the bullshit for a whole year. For the first 6 months, pretend like you just started. Have an opinion when you should, but don't pretend like you know what someone wants, etc. Your life will become a lot easier if you make the analyst's life easier if you can, cause they will work way harder for you. Every analyst in my group knows that you want to work harder for the associates that are great to work with (don't create extra work, don't waste time, serious when they need to be but otherwise nice people). This is obviously from an analyst's perspective but I think it would improve the experience a lot of anyone who thinks about incorporating some of this into their day to day when they start.
This is a good thread. To piggyback (hopefully not hijack), what are the best PPT courses relevant to IBD? I will be a summer associate this yr and have taken a fair amount of modeling courses but I’m deff lacking in PPT.
Check out Udemy, you really just need to learn how to use the ribbon commands on native excel / ppt. Then if you know your bank uses a software available at school like Macabacus or FactSet or Capital IQ then learn how to use those too in Excel / PPT if possible. It's just so much easier to learn new things when you know some stuff already.
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