How rare is that? I'm hoping to go to an M7 school and I'm currently in banking at a good firm (a big one regionally but probably unknown in the States); I'd love to do buyside (PE) out of my MBA but I think that's unrealistic considering I don't have a BB on my resume yet, so I'd probably go for the BB jobs right out of school. To those of you who have some insight on the recruiting process for associates, do people with former banking experience have an edge at all, or does it depend more on undergrad school/blue chip background? A definite plus I could see is that I would definitely hit the ground running on a summer associate gig and know how to work with analysts already.
Would people ask why I'd take a break from banking to get back into banking?
you want to do PE post b school you need to get to a PE firm before goign to b school. anything. any small growth shop, middle market shop, whatever you can get to get the experience. that gives you a big leg up on the process. if you stay in banking, go to an MBA and come up to do more banking, itll be tough to make the jump initially and harder until you hit the senior levels.
yea, read somewhere that the general concensus is that 9/10 times second year MBAs with banking backgrounds wont get PE itnerviews without prior PE experience.
That's what I thought. My worry is that even BB jobs might be limited by the fact that I don't have a more interesting background than other bschool students, added to the fact that I'll be an international student.
To be clear, my question has to do with BB investment banking positions, not PE.
i saw a lot of folks that weren't able to land pe/hf jobs "end up" in BB banking. most had MM experience and kept BB banking as a "backup".
having an interesting background is nice (i.e. - olympian, teacher, etc), but in the end, what matters is if you are motivated and can get the work done.
good luck.
I've only worked with one, she was an analyst before b-school and returned to the same group afterwards. Never really saw the logic in it, to be honest, but I understand the circumstances. Other than that I knew a guy that worked at a BB doing muni's before B-school.
For me it's more of an entry thing, in case you were wondering. Dubai experience doesn't really translate to US experience, so I'd have to do the MBA as an entry point for the US recruiting cycle. Plus it'd be a nice break taking 2 years off from 15-plus-hour work days.
Just finished up my MBA at a target school and noticed that following about BB recruiting both 1st and 2nd Yr...(1) most people who were in banking ahead of b-school weren't looking to return to banking following graduation and (2) the few who were only had a slight advantage in that the recruiters knew that the candidates knew what they were getting themselves into (or back into) with banking...otherwise they were questioned about taking the two years off and/or went through more rigorous interview questions...
That's very useful, thanks.
The vast majority of MBA students are "career changers". Very, very few return to the career field they were in prior to b-school.
Also, at the very top tier of MBA programs, IB is not really a very sought after job. Most people consider it a great job to get out of ugrad, but you really only pursue it after b-school because: 1) you couldn't land a PE gig, or 2) you're trying to break into finance with no finance experience and IB and S&T are the two options available. Do those for as long as necessary and hope to transition to the buyside before you burn out....
Whether you were in S&T or IB out of ugrad, the question interviewers will ask you during MBA recruiting is this: "Why are you interviewing for an associate position? If you were any good in the first place you would have been promoted to associate without having gone to b-school and spent $120,000 for your MBA."
You can definitely provide a good, valid answer to that question, but the point is that recruiters will assume the worst and you have to prove them wrong. In contrast to being a career changer where you are starting out with a clean slate.
1.) If you need to do PE pre-MBA to do PE post-MBA and 2.) if the vast majority of the IB analysts do not go back to IB after doing IB, what do those many-many analysts do after MBA??? All go into corp dev, or what?
That's the allure of the MBA--clean slate so they can do anything they want. At my school the biggest draws were finance and consulting, so if you came from one people often tried out the other one (i.e. leave IB, decide you don't want to go back to finance, so try out strat consulting).
That said, finance (incl. IBD, S&T, PE, and HF) plus consulting only covers about 70% of the class. The other 30% go into real estate, marketing, media & entertainment, entrepreneurship, etc. So there are plenty of former bankers, S&T, and consultants at b-school going into those types of areas.
You'd be surprised how many MBAs pursue careers outside of the "traditional" areas, and get their post-MBA jobs not from on-campus recruiting by big firms, but rather at smaller firms through non-standard recruiting. The desire for prestige and a well-defined career path are great after ugrad, but after getting an MBA a lot of people realize they want to do their own thing and be happy, so the careers chosen are a lot more varied than people usually think....
So the conclusion is that those who miss the "banking/consulting train", coming out of ugrad, should not consider it a catastrophe, because even the vast majority of bankers and consultants will realize that it would be nice to have a life after the MBA and have a job that still pays well and lets you have a life. And in order to achieve this, you certainly do not have to have a consulting/banking background.
I know it is an odd example, but this reminds me of Derek Vinyard in American History X, who realized in the jail, that being angry and frustrated all the time does not make sense at all and consumes your life, that is not too long anyways...
People always talk about getting promoted directly to associate, but I've heard this is pretty rare, so is that a legitimate question for a recruiter to ask? I could definitely manage it in Dubai, but I'm looking to leave this place and work abroad, so the MBA is kind of my exit strategy after I become a senior analyst (one notch below associate at my firm).
In response to the original question - the only BB associates I've met with prior experience all worked in regional markets or MM firms before B-School.
I think direct promotes have become increasingly common, but given you're coming from a regional market I don't think saying that you wanted to transition to the US and BB is a bad answer to the "Why go MBA?" question, especially if your firm doesn't have a US presence.
Also the only people I saw landing PE jobs this year had prior PE experience, and not all who met that criteria found jobs. My understanding is that if you really want PE placement post-MBA, you should really be at HBS or Wharton.
so what, then, would you think should be analogous in the real world to the rape?
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