Prospective SAs and Late Stage FT - General Advice

For those with first round interviews coming up, here are some critical questions you need to think hard on:

1) Why Investment Banking / Finance in general?

2) Why S&T or IBD or PWM specifically? You need to know exactly what the roles are for an analyst in each one

3) Why the specific bank? Read the news and find some big recent deals -- this should be a cakewalk

4) Why are you willing to put the insane hours in? Why are you willing to give up Friday and Saturday nights and weekends for 2 years?

5) What are your plans after your 2 year analyst commitment?

6) Why not work in consulting? Traveling and weekends off are appealing

7) In a pool of 10,000 candidates, why are you the most qualified? This is the only question where I would "show off".

8) What is EBITDA? What is EV? Why do we care? Why is Net Income a "dirty" number?

9) Explain the difference between Free Cash Flow and EBITDA. Why do we care?

10) What is going on in the markets now? Where are the markets going? Don't talk only about stocks. You should understand what is going on with interest rates and even some FX.

11) Where do Investment Banks generate the bulk of their profits in most quarters?

12) And most importantly, what does an analyst do on a day to day basis? Search the board to learn about this.

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