Kids These Days Need to Chill Out
It is absolutely ridiculous these days that kids need to lock in starting when they're 17 for an investment banking job that frankly doesn't require it until the summer before sophomore year (with how accelerated recruitment is). I just got off the phone with a freshman looking to get into a semi-target IB program, and it is absurd that students feel the need to sacrifice their early college experience to join clubs/orgs with equally ridiculous requirements. There is a fine line between a student who is highly driven and committed to the grind that recruitment brings, and a student who would be better suited going to a bar and talking to the opposite sex instead of prepping a 3-statement model in a classroom for a business fraternity at midnight. Yes, some firms are looking for virgins who live, breathe, and die by the 400-question guide, but I don't want to work next to somebody who has no idea what a hangover feels like and what a parlay is. Let's be honest with ourselves: these intro-level positions don't require rigorous preparation from the age of 17. I think most of these kids, in their freshman year, looking for careers in finance, would do better experiencing what it's like to get fucked instead of looking forward to a career in which they get fucked by their VP at 2 in the morning, turning comments. For reference- extreme non-target to incoming An1 BB NY.
Absolutely correct. It seems like more and more kids are incapable of discussing anything beyond how the recent FED meeting will impact their terminal value assumptions for a mock DCF on Nvidia, all for a case comp they won't even be selected to present on.
man ngl i have no idea how this works. interest rate change changes terminal growth rate????
Generally you should google stuff like this when possible, but not terminal growth rate think discount rate and what comprises it.
I was testing you to see if you knew
A sad but honestly pretty common thing nowadays. Competition seems to be the name of the game for college students. Not just in finance. I've met freshmen in CS who have 100+ leetcode problems solved, Bio majors with full research and MCAT prep, and poly sci students already interviewing and looking for law school stuff.
It's natural to say this is insane, and to tell college students to stop, but it's another thing to actually change the culture of competition placed into high achieving kids since the day they entered HS(Or earlier). Gotta remember, most students at top schools nowadays have 10x the achievements their parents might have had. So these kids are hyper competitive, and everyone else around them is also competitive asf. So, what happens? They feel like they have to do more and more and more every single year, and with the labor market being as piss poor as it is this only reinforces the idea for young people that they need to be absolutely perfect.
I'd much rather chill but then the kid who spends all day in the library is gonna get the job and I'm gonna be out on the street
This culture of competition is not so much high achieving kids as it is one of first-generation / immigrant strivers. I saw plenty of them during my undergrad years at Harvard, and while they ended up achieving and being successful, I always felt like it came at the expense of something. The legacies or "nepo-babies" (as the kids call them these days) had such a different experience from them and still largely ended up doing just fine. Plus, they were much more fun to hang around with.
>The legacies or "nepo-babies" (as the kids call them these days) had such a different experience from them and still largely ended up doing just fine. Plus, they were much more fun to hang around with
gee, i wonder why
I have a FT offer at a BB final year of uni.
I dont know how to chill, i have been grinding all my life laser focus, cool, now I dont need to and I want to chill and do the things you talk about, but how???
want to get drunk and party every week but all my friends are not into that stuff and its weird to do that shit by yourself. how do i lifeexperience-maxx in my final 12 months of freedom
pls advice if you want to be funny and reply something like
> haha loser
pls fuck off
haha loser
you're cooked buddy
Congrats on the offer, hard work paid off clearly.
You basically need to behave like a fresher (a first year, new kid). Put yourself out there and socialise with people outside your group.
Gonna be a bit tough since you will have to go through the necessary embarrassment usually isolated to Y1 but eh.
Networking socially snowballs similarly to networking, but with a more extreme curve typically (more time to inflection, steeper growth past inflection), so just send it with every society under the sun or whoever you bump into in class
All of this builds a network of drinking buddies. Then again, a lot of people assume that being hungover ever day is what they want without ever stopping to ask if that’s actually true.
Go have the college experience but don’t forget to have the college experience that YOU actually want
Study Abroad semester. Good way to end your college career.
take some drugs and go to raves
No joke do shrooms
I'll try to give advice from someone a bit older. The whole "live you college life" thing is really overblown and most get really sick of it fast. What I can say is that life gets SO much more fun once you actually have money. My recommendation is to make a bucket list. Have a list on your phone and whenever someone brings up some fun or interesting idea, write it down. You can narrow your list later.
For your final year, make new friends. Meet new people. You aren't attached to one group the rest of your life. You've done it before. While I personally cannot recommend the lifestyle you're proposing(it's a real easy way to end up addicted to the lifestyle and crashing tf out after a couple years), if you want to do so then finding new friends is best. But don't think you need to live out some fantasy scenario of drinking and partying to have a maximized time in college. Plenty of other ways to maximize your life.
sure I agree with you. I just don't want to end up being a total socially incompetent loser (which I am not entirely since I managed to have sufficient social skills to get a return).
But I feel like that college exp is one way to become better socialised, be better with women, better conversationalist etc etc.
I want to be an interesting person basically. Thinking of doing some more travelling and random stuff on my bucket list. Thanks.
Good advice ladiesman217
If you can, go to Europe. Even just a 10-14 day trip will be life changing for you. The drinking and partying are way better there on average and it's so easy to talk to girls (and people in general) because you're a foreigner and you're automatically interesting. "Where are you from?" can kick up an incredible convo with anyone. That sense of freedom and exploration will really help you "lifeexperience-maxx" as you put it. Don't plan out your day-to-day, don't stress about the money, stay off your phone as much as possible and just go get lost. You'll never be as young as you are now and you'll never be a senior in college again. I know it probably feels weird to treat yourself and turn the burners off, but you earned this. Make the most of it. Whether it's drinking on the porch all day or playing xbox till 2am, just do what feels fun and natural without punishing yourself or stressing out. I honestly wish I cared less in college. Think less, enjoy more. Best of luck to ya!
make new friends?
how did you break in from a non target, I’m trying to do same?
I think it's just gonna get more competitive to be honest, if it even can. If we're right about AI the number of seats are going to be significantly reduced over the next couple years so competition for those few seats will sky rocket, and if we're wrong and the bubble pops in a big way, the economy is going to be worse than it already is, and the job market will be horrendous, meaning more kids will start to panick and prep earlier.
at that point they would only be taking the top of the top kids from Harvard yale Prinston
If the shoe fits...
Realistically that won't happen because HYP simply don't have enough kids interested in IB. But regardless of that, the banks could give two fucks about college students. Their job is to make as much money as possible, so if they can get away with hiring as little as possible, they're gonna do it. Doesn't matter if they completely fuck over the remaining employees.
If I don't blow my head off by time I graduate, I'll find another job. People are sometimes good at adapting when the avenue to success is cut off. Maybe I'll take some dead end job and be dead at 28 instead of 21. The point is kids now came in at the end. It's done.
The world will keep on ticking because money keeps getting made. You want it one way but it's the other way.
Its on par with going to med school. Highly selective and competitive because of the pay. Personally, I’d rather have a kid that was into it in high school and took their time to learn something like a three statement model, it’s good motivation. But I completely agree on having no social life being an issue. Ultimately, you will have to deal with other people and clients and if all you can talk about is finance then I’d wonder what’s wrong with you.
Can't blame the kids when the firms recruit early sophomore year basically for a job for 2+ years later. These aren't the times of the current MDs that had no idea what IB was and got an analyst spot with a firm handshake.
Wouldn't be surprised if in a couple years sophmores in HS start networking on LinkedIn. Hell when I was in HS the only thing I was concerned about was the new Warzone update and if the Grau 556 was still the meta.
Edit: Sort of a funny story. I was on a call with a group head and they strongly emphasized that if I wanted to get into S&T I needed to know the products that were getting traded like they were the back of my hand. I asked them what they did in undegrad and their job was post grad and they replied " I majored in poly sci and became a lawyer. I didn't like being a lawyer so after 3 years I went into finance." Funny that they wouldn't even meet the expectations that they set for me.
I've gotten Linkedin messages from high school grads in the summer before starting college. I didn't do that but to be fair I knew of and was lurking around WSO back in high school already too.
bro i got a high school sophomore on linkedin reach out to me to ask how i got into finance. i was like brother im an incoming sa at a no name bank...
here in brazil there are highschools that already have investment clubs for the students that want to work in finance, so they can be already ahead as freshmen hahaha
"Yes, some firms are looking for virgins who live, breathe, and die by the 400-question guide, but I don't want to work next to somebody who has no idea what a hangover feels like and what a parlay is."
This is not really my problem with these kids. Honestly, I can get along with anyone whether they are super nerdy, boring, or really extroverted.
However, what I don't think these kids realize is that they are setting themselves up for longer term failure. Sure, maybe you can get into Goldman and then a PE group. But at some point, you have to transition to a VP where sales and management of other people become more important. You're going to be seriously hampered at this point if you've had no social life since 17. What's the point of doing all this if you are inadvertently creating a ceiling for yourself right when the money gets really good.
college kids in reality: "ts paper lbo so 6 7endy!"
Sounds like the lion's share of users agree with you OP. I think the better questions are, A. Why is this occurring, and B. What can we do about it?
A. Why is this occurring? I think most of us generally understand the drivers here. Hiring for these coveted jobs (whether it be IB, Consulting, Software Engineering, etc.) are pretty flat or down over a 5 year period (exceptions being Software Engineering) jobs, which have grown significantly, but still have seen outsized growth in # of grads with CS degrees. At the same time, population in the US has increased ~15million, so there are more heads competing for these roles. Additionally, the path to success for these roles (especially finance and consulting) is more broadly known and cemented. While timelines continue to be pushed up, the case study and IBD 400 question guide approach to consulting and IBD, respectively, hasn't changed in the last 10 years.
B. So, the better question is, what can we do about it? In short, I dont have a great answer here. But you can focus on what you can control. Get a good GPA, or even a decent GPA. Land a FT role, and once in it, perform well. I know MDs in IBD who started working in construction. I know VPs in banking that tracked inventory levels out of school, as they graduated in 08 and there really were no jobs. Yes the recruiting process is broken. As a sophmore in college, I thought big4 accounting was the best job out there. I simply didnt know any better, and I didnt have a network of folks in finance. I guess what I am getting at is while you cant control the fact that the odds of landing a coveted role get slimmer each year, you can take solace in the fact that careers are long and if you are a high performer, you will get an opportunity to end up where you want to be if you continue to work at it.
it's always been competitive (I was in college in the mid/late 2000s)... the biggest difference is that timing has become much earlier in terms of recruitment overall (from internships to FT IB to PE). Combine that with your point on increased competition over the past few years (which I agree with) and you get to where we are...More hardos because if you miss your shot, you're kind of screwed.
The funny thing is that banks don't want complete hardos though (or at least some banks don't, again to go full circle back to OPs original point).
I remember acing the technicals of an interview for an IB internship. I walked the Analyst through an LBO I had built and how I came up with the EBITDA turns per tranche of debt, he responded with "Well I definitely didn't know that when I was your age". Didn't miss a single technical, but I came off like a boring loser robot.
I think this can be a huge challenge for those of us who went to no-name or underrepresented universities. You want to show that you can be really hardworking and have committed to learning the fundamentals of the role and then some, only to be beaten out by a frat bro from OSU (true story, I met one of the guys who got the role over me). FWIW, I am not here to discredit the person who beat me out in an internship interviewee many years ago (props to him, he did a much better job of reading his audience than I did), but I just mean to say that for a lot of students out there today, I emphasize, because you are caught between a rock and a hard place - try too hard, and get labeled a no life hardo, but mess up a few technicals, and you might lose out to someone more prepared than you.
Honestly the issue is the fact that you can fake it while you're young
I was a cross country runner in high school I was nowhere near D1 tier but if I bumped my mileage from 50mpw to 70mpw maybe I could have impressed a few minor D1 schools and gotten some okay offers to run in college.
That's life and that's the modern banking/finance industry. I have now worked at two major Market Makers in Prop Trading that many would know by name and a lot of the time in interviews with students I can't help but sit back and think does this guy have it or is it just mileage. AKA is this does this guy have the ability is this a gem in the rough? For cross country analogy again is this a guy that's run 30mpw and is 10 top in state? Or is this just some burnt out kid that has been chugging 100mpw for the past 2 years?
Finding talent in youth is tough because you can't use the actual indicators (real success in career because they don't have any and they will never have any at the colleg level) you just have to take a bet and hope you didn't buy the guy that has been preened his whole life for this.
My ultimate answer which a lot won't like is you need to change the game - it's too formulaic because of the internet everyone knows everything already (atleast the hardos do) and everything has been or is getting fully optimized out. There's no edge in doing leetcodes theres no edge in asking brainteasers all the fucking kids know that shit already. Some times you gotta just nut up and take risk on a guy the same way you would a position that'll pay. You gotta shake it up and just throw some wild shit at the wall and you might just find the real talent the built alot of these companies
(this entire thing was worded from the prospective of prop trading/market making but I think it is relevenat to IBD as well)
MBA Asso is chilling here
I agree with your general premise, but why blame the kids? They’re just kids
The solution for this is for all of the banks to pick one date to recruit on and stick to it. Max of 1 year before the internship starts. That will never happen, but that’d solve the problem
I don't think that would change the culture though. Back in the day there you just needed to get an internship your junior year summer. Now you got freshman internships, sophomore internships and spring weeks, remote internships to pad your resume.
Kids are just more competitive these days. The supply of seats is going down, and everybody is trying to get on the last ship.
You make a good point there about the culture, do you think the number of open seats is the main driver for that culture shift?
I can see it in my office, we’re way understaffed compared to what the seniors talk about being a “normal headcount”
It's going to get more and more competitive, a few decades ago just showing up was enough. Then you needed a college degree, after that it was a degree from a good college, now you need a good college + great ECs to stand out. There are so many people with access to free resources out there.
The only solution to this is GDP growth. Look at what happens in countries where GDP growth is stagnant, parents have less kids and invest more money in their children’s education. Korea / Japan hagwon culture w/ American flavor is all this is.
It’s easy to blame the kids, but if they want even a chance of replicating their parents way of life they need do this. A middle class kid will remain middle class working in a white collar services job (medicine, law, IB). It used to offer class mobility. Now it barely buys one home. Take even something as simple as getting married. Every part of that process has rent seekers squeezing dollars out of it knowing ppl will pay to keep up. It’s turning into a luxury good. If you don’t believe me, look at marriage rates by income cohort.
Most of the comments are just gaslighting the experiences of young people. I’m 8yrs out of school & financially doing very well but I can relate. In college, I was the grinder / striver trying to make it. I drank a lot, made friends, and had a great time but didn’t date / get laid. I had strict (brown) parents growing up, they were well-off but I knew any help from them as an adult came with many strings attached so I focused on financial freedom. Now I’m still single (w/ no prospects) while my friends are married / close to getting married. But I own a home in a HCOL city, never worry about money, and travel whenever I want. It’d be nice to find a girlfriend and settle down but you can’t have everything, just have to live with the choices you make.
I also knew that if I didn’t focus on career, I’d probably be screwed b/c I don’t get the same kind of mentorship a white guy gets from his PE partner. There are def firms that assumed I wasn’t a culture fit b/c I didn’t play a sport in college or there was a better Indian (better school, slightly higher GPA, slightly better bank) they could choose for that spot. I’ve still managed to find mentors & build relationships at work but it requires more effort on my part b/c it feels like I need to do more to fit in since I wasn’t raised that way.
None of this is a complaint. Just stating my experience. I don’t view myself as a victim or anything like that. But I also knew I couldn’t get away with being the 3.6 GPA finals fraternity guy who’d get the first look for a MS/GS/EB job from my school b/c he’s a good hang, I had to prove I’m a good hang after I get the job. It’s easy to say, you prefer working with the nepo hire who seems more chill but if that’s not you, then you gotta outwork everyone else.
It’s gotten so competitive, that you just can’t stumble into it once you show up to school. You have no choice but to compete. Maybe a few ppl still stumble into it nowadays, but if you do learn about it ahead of time, you are doing yourself a disservice by not-competing / waiting b/c there’s probably 3-4 kids who aren’t waiting and outworking you.
The only solution to this is higher rGDP growth or boomers dying faster. So you can engineer higher rGDP growth through praying for an infra bubble (AI) or massive scale deregulation so boomer businesses can get disrupted by younger entrepreneurs in a more efficient / higher value way. And #2 is actually worse, they are prob going to live a little longer than we expect. There’s no country in the world that’s fixed a runaway real estate problem & youth are screwed globally but esp in developed countries.
you pretty much highlighted the main reason I left the United States. Again, so grateful to have been born there, but the amount of grinding you have to do just to get a middle class quality of life is so exponentially higher than it used to be that it leaves very few moments for leisure, introspection, or general self discovery. I feel bad for each generation younger than me. I’m five years out of school, and I think it’s bad, but I look at the kids in elementary and middle school right now, and can’t even imagine what America is going to look like for them.
don’t hate the player
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It's our own faults as millennials and older gen-z for contributing to this "knowledgeflation" for interviews and industry elitism. Platforms like LinkedIn also cause every firm from 5 person boutique through BB to get 1,000s of resumes and have inflated perceptions of themselves.
Often in early round interviews (especially on zoom/teams) is interviewer and candidate looking at the same 400 question guide and reading the same Q&A as a weird ritual before getting to the final boss. I've worked at some firms that don't ask interviewers to grill too hard on technicals, but had colleagues who use it as some weird stroke for their ego on a Tuesday afternoon to see a college student sweat over maintenance covenants on an LBO build, when the job is with an ECM-heavy team that rarely executes on M&A mandates.
Then, you'll get to an easy interview with an Gen-X MD who may not even know the existence of this guide and recognizes that 90% of the job they're hiring you for is for making powerpoints pretty, and adjusting numbers to fit the narrative they need on refreshed excel templates. The job is not that deep at the end of the day.
i started charging kids for coffee chats. $200/30 mins
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