Has Anyone Worked at Both a BB and EB?

I’ve interned at a BB and interned at an EB. I will be starting FT at the EB this summer.

I can only speak to my internships and the experiences of both.

The BB had a full suite of resources available that the EB did not. There is an entire team in India dedicated to support for creating slides and research; this allows analysts to go home earlier and/or outsource a lot of the tedious work for the teams in India to do overnight. The EB had something similar, but it was stateside. It was very minimally staffed overnight. However, with the BB, I’d often have to make corrections when I received the PPT slides back... so it’s pretty much a net wash on time usage, but a lot of the tedious things were taken care of. The quality of work from the PPT team at the EB was much better, but they had less bandwidth than the outsource team. +0.5 to the BB

I was not staffed on this at the BB, but a few of the interns I know were. They had like weekly or biweekly newsletters that they put out; it seemed pretty boring and monotonous. Lots of marketing material. While that may exist at the EB, I did not see it - +1.0 to the EB

The BB has a full suite of products that they can offer clients, rather than just M&A/strategic advisory and some sort of capital markets advisory. At the BB, a management meeting I was staffed on had 4 people from the coverage group and an additional 4 of 5 people from LevFin. Lots and lots of people staffed on the project. It didn’t really matter that much in the grand scheme of things, but it was a notably large team for something that was ultimately not needed. The largest team I was staffed on at the EB was 2 analysts, 2 associates, 1 VP, 1 MD, and one partner. It was a very intensive project, so we definitely needed all of the labor. The EB generally ran pretty lean. As an intern, I felt like I had more responsibility at the EB. +1.0

The EB also spent much more on their intern program. Tons of drinking events, group specific happy hours, partner lunches, etc. The intern program at the EB was a lot more fun than the BB’s. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy my time at the BB, but it’s clear that the spend per head at the EB far outpaced the BB. I can imagine that translates to the rest of the bank. EB +1.0

I also got a lot more interaction with senior bankers at the EB as an intern. I had 0 interaction with people higher than a junior MD at the BB and that was only to be in rooms with them during meetings while I took notes. I was asked questions in an internal meeting by partners at the EB and they took what I said seriously; it was incorporated into the presentation to the client. +1.0 EB

In my experiences, if I could point to one thing that really highlighted the difference between EBs and BBs, at the junior banker/intern level, it is the amount of trust that the EBs put in their junior personnel. I could not send emails outside of the BB, where as I was expected to interact with the client where I could at the EB. There were a handful of times where I was the only EB representative on a call. While the calls were largely inconsequential and nothing was expected out of me besides taking notes, I felt like a valuable member of the team... rather than just a passive observer. There was also a client call where I could have spoken up about an issue I had done a lot of research on. I didn’t, because I felt like I was just an intern and my opinion wasn’t going to be super useful. The analyst on the team came over to my desk after the call and told me that I need to speak up next time, because I was the team expert on the material and could have provided more color into the subject. +2.0 to the EB.

This sounds like I’m fawning over the EB - none of this is to say that the BB platform is a place that you should avoid or that the EB platform is soooo much better than the BB. A BB provides much more in terms optionality for internal career mobility, global rotations, and Average Joe Jaw Dropping Ability. +A lot to the BB

Any hiring manager in finance is going to know the EB you worked at, but outside of M&A/M&A adjacent/investing roles, you just won’t have that name branding. People say it’s not important, but the Avg Joe knows Harvard/Yale/Princeton(GS/MS/JPM). The Avg Joe does not know the NESCAC/CMC Consortium(CVP/PJT/EVR).

Both the BBs and EBs will give you great opportunities to launch your career, just like the Ivies and tier 1 LACs. The EB and BB platforms are very different experiences, but you can’t really go wrong with either of them.

Keep in mind these are only my anecdotal observations from one summer at a BB coverage group and one summer at an EB.

The quality of people at both institutions were top notch and I have nothing bad about either firm or platform; they’re just different animals.