Cannot do another year in IB....my life has already completely faded away and I am in a quite dark place.

What's your biggest worry? Is it your girlfriend leaving you or the all-nighters that you are expecting? If it's your girlfriend, I wouldn't quit but instead would communicate with her about the reality of my job. Tell her that you only have a year or so left until your work lightens up. Hopefully she will be understanding.

If the horrible work schedule worries you, then maybe listen to the advice above. Search for new jobs before you quit. Maybe one year is enough to get a great PE or corporate gig?

I'm still young and I don't know everything but that's what I would say. Would you guys say that OP is having the typical experience for someone in IB? Is this fairly common or is he just in a bad group? I'm trying to decide myself if this is the right career to go into so I'd love the insight.

"just want to obtain good work experience to move on to a corporate or PE"

PE is the exact same.

And I'm yet to see a single person just walk out of IB and straight into "corporate/startup/strategy" etc. which are total  slogs in their own right. You'll get anecdotal evidence from WSO, but it is not the norm.

Of course you went into IB because of prestige. That’s why you are now thinking about moving into PE - which is just the same as other people here pointed out.

Maybe you’ll realise there is something more important than prestige though - focus on your relationship if that is what makes you happy. Hoping other prospects with similar set-ups pre-IB would think more about this. 

I would take a moment and think about why you chose the job in the first place and what you hope to get out of it moving forward. For me it was just taking advantage of the learning curve and becoming more confident about my own value in the industry.

Like you, in the first year, I was absolutely miserable, despite being a very solid analyst. The way that I pulled myself out of the funk was to start focusing on what I said in the first paragraph. For example, I started to take more time between turns, lower my response time, and actually think about what I was doing and how it could be applied later in life. The main thing is that I just stopped worrying about being the best analyst for the firm and instead on becoming the best version of me.

Part of this comes with confidence. If you know the group generally values you, and that it would be more difficult to replace you (maybe as a result of the txns you’re on), then stop worrying about being perfect. So what if you end up being middle bucket next year? At least you’re happy and following the goals you set out from the start.

Would suggest that while you’re doing the above, you should start looking for another role. Think long term. You don’t need to be a process monkey to make money and be fulfilled. Think about what you’re good at and what makes you valuable. I left banking following the above and it’s worked out of far.

I've seen alot of these posts over the last 18 months and firms are starting to try and slow churn and have better work life balances. I used to be a relatively OK at best analyst, hated my team and 1 VP in particular, had no mentors, and no one pushing back on BS requests from Srs. I left the firm to join a better bank but made it clear that culture and being there long term are important to me. Fast forward a few years and after another move, I'm at a top bank, about to be a VP and always look out for analysts and push back on time consuming, low value add.  

What I'm getting at is that it is possible to make it in IB, even after a total shitty first year. As someone mentioned, you need to have those low maintenance friends who dont care when you are late and GF who sees the long term goal.

Given that, I am myself starting to feel Covid catch up to me, not enjoying the job as much from home but its not the first time. There are highs and low, its like being sick, you take for granted being healthy until feel like shit. Now that you have felt the bottom, you can try and climb out and not take for granted enjoying even the smallest parts of this job. Bonus checks also greatly help..

Guy above gets it. As someone who also worked in the industry for a few years, everyone has their own way of dealing with it, but at a point I encourage you just to mentally quit, while staying in the role. This means a few things:

• don’t reply and actively mute emails/teams/your phone past 12:30am. If someone gets upset reply, “sorry I fell asleep and didn’t wake up. In the future I will try to not fall asleep as early” (but don’t change a thing in reality)
• If work begins to stretch past a certain late hour that you are currently working on, message the VP and say, “I need to get rest, I will pickup where I left off in the morning” if they have a problem with this they either will do the work themselves or push the timeline. Otherwise it wasn’t actually urgent. Regardless they might complain or say things like, “you can’t do that” but guess what, you can do that. Main reason being, you don’t want to be in your current role and still are working insane hours until midnight, so it’s defendable to someone when you leave. Also, all banks are spread so thin and analyst programs are so short, that very rarely do people get fired, even people that barely do their job. If it actually becomes such a problem that you setting boundaries affects the deal team, your bank will add another analyst. Realistically though, this doesn’t happen and the VP/ associate will just be forced to begin doing more analyst work.
• Accept your placement/ bucketing has likely already been determined and it won’t actually impact your future if you aren’t staying at that bank.

My advice to anyone reading this and OP is pretty simple, if you are an analyst planning to leave or who realized this isn’t the right role for them, understand your value and begin communicating boundaries. An employee that does their job but communicates boundaries in advance is actually a great hire for a firm the key is communicating to your teams, being predictable, and having the confidence to state, not ask for permission, things you will do. It’s not a request for you to not work past 1am, it is a fact.

On the backend of my analyst experience, I was very obviously putting in less effort to help my teams and set frequent boundaries I wouldn’t even dream of when I started, but because I had experience under my belt, I still was very valuable to any team I got staffed on. In fact, it always felt more like I only got called in to really do work when there was a fire drill and at that point, just do the right thing and help everyone on your team and do a really solid job. But set boundaries on the BS—accept that you are no longer going for employee of the month my man. Do the bare minimum, while not screwing over someone next to you (or the analyst behind you).