How did IB change the way you work?
I am just an intern so take it with a grain of salt but i think the mismatch between the skillsets required for entry level IB and the competitiveness of recruiting process in recent years is quite enormous.
Imo most of IB (except certain teams…), especially at the analyst level, is quite chill in terms of the intellectual intensity the work required—any normal human being with a highschool certificate knows how to send slides to offshore support teams and do data room management and take meeting notes that nobody will probably read for a second time.
And I’ve heard it’s often the case that super try hard interns actually don’t get return as such quality correlates with social awkwardness and higher egos. Also, these people would grind at 3am on the least important extra bullshit work to show that they are tough and capable in the first few weeks, but in reality burn themselves out before poorly delivering the actual important works that might pop up unexpectedly. I’d rather go home at 7pm if I have no work and rest instead of tiring myself at the desk doing pretend banking and with no energy when I’m suddenly staffed on some pitch at 11pm.
Also, I imagined that all the complex technicals like crazy merger math I learned during recruiting would seem to matter a lot less during work, as my sole focus would be making my superior’s life easier so that they would look better in front of their seniors.
But I imagined theres gotta be a point, a deal perhaps, or maybe this is a more subtle transition and I am just completely stupid, where an analyst is put into an uncomfortable position so that one can feel some growing pain and actually use the brain to execute something? There seems to be some tacit skillsets or mentality that distinguishes a bad and good analyst who will make it in banking, and go up the ladder, since I feel like seniors are definitely required to have a different set of skills than just being a puppet robot.
Idk these are more like vague questions and rambles. But would appreciate any thoughts!
Your post is quite rambly but I think your perspective is primarily because you are an intern and haven’t received much actual repsonsibility. I would generally agree that IB doesn’t require a lot of intellect, but you will get thrown on some live deals in 2 years of banking that require you to learn a lot in a very short amount of time (being thrown in the fire). Once you go through this a few times and learn how to model/run processes it does get repetitive, but that’s why a lot of people leave banking after 2 years and go into PE.
As an experience I found PE to be a lot more intellectually stimulating as you actually have to come up with ideas and reasons to invest and then execute on them, vs. banking tends to be more client services vibes.
To answer what I think was the initial intent of question from title (ignoring the rambling / tangents) - few ways IB has clearly changed the way I work (observe same qualities almost universally in other folks who are or were banking analysts / associates)
Going to put aside technical skills, industry knowledge, finance "learnings" - as these really vary by bank/group/individual - and are more in the bucket of "work experience" vs "the way you work"
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