Confused Little Monkey
I am currently a sophomore in college at a non-target school. I was not sure what I wanted to do for a career, but I came across Investment Banking and decided to network with 8-10 family friends in the field over the summer and do some research into the field. They all said the same things: slaving long hours in Excel and PowerPoint, waiting for comments, 3am/4am nights, bitchy MD’s, etc, but the pay is great, plus exit opps and such.
My question to all of the Monkeys on WSO—mainly to the current and post IB guys— is it worth it? Is sacrificing your mental health, time with family, weekends, and other important life events worth the money and the exit opportunities? I am genuinely curious. I have always been competitive my whole life and I strive to be the most successful one in my family, but is the measure of success making the most money, or being the happiest over the longest period of time?
I believe that going into IB out of college will set you up for life. Even if you do not last in the industry, you will make an above average income and still be very successful in life. Maybe this is me being naive and not knowing shit. Who knows.
For the guys who despised IB, what did you do after, and what career path do you recommend instead?
Of course it’s worth it, I love my job at FT Partners (140k base btw)
you are violently unfunny
Tfw you have to lower your analyst base
Sincerely I believe it’s not a big deal.I’ve seen my mentor do 5am-12am work days 7 days a week for almost a decade. He is now head of multiple successful companies and can offer everything to his family.
Seeing that, I’ve never been afraid of putting the hard-work. Sure it depends on what your definition of success or happiness is. But for me, the hardship is worth it if at the end the price is big enough.
said like a true intern
LOL, if he's working 5am to 12am 7 days per week, he doesn't have a family.
Was a shitty 2 years but worth it to me...
I’ve herd the WLB in PE isn’t even that much better, is that true? Curious why IB is shitted on and PE is not since most have described it as IB 2.0
Can only speak to my firm, but my WLB has been way better in PE. I work 50-60hr weeks and limited weekend work outside of deal sprints. It's more shop dependent than IB. Similarly I find the work to be way more interesting and the people better to be around. In my experience IB was like a never ending nightmare where I had to be glued to my laptop 24/7 for fear of missing an email to work on super mindless tasks. Have never felt that way in PE.
Most of my peers/college buddies do IB, but I only did an M&A internship long long time ago and eventually chose smt else so take this with a grain of salt. But the way I look at it/my friends, sure in general it’s tough work, but there’re two cases: One is that you don’t know what you want to do and you use IB as a tool to delay the inevitable decision on what you want to. In this case, best case scenario you figure out what you want to do and you continue/switch out/exit. It’s the worst case scenario that makes it bad: you still never figure out what you want to do and it’s just an endless tunnel of suffering without a light ahead since you don’t like the work. The other case is that you figure out what you want to do and either that’s banking or that’s smt banker exit to (PE, VC, certain HF). In this case, it’s some grinding but you’ll be fine and eventually it’ll be worth it. Of course if you’re this kind of people, don’t get so fixated on the mean to an end, if you find a good shop without IB, go for it. So I think just know what you’re in it for, how do you weigh the trade off. It really it’s only not worth it if you’re in it because you don’t know what you want to do and you never figure it out and just use IB as an escape from reality. Sometime I think a lot of bank saw this mindset from young people nowadays and take advantage of their labor. Eventually that became the cost of indecisiveness of young students.
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