Senior Banker's Guide to IB Recruiting / Group Placement (with a Healthcare Bent)

I've gotten a surprising number of messages since I put up the data-driven healthcare investment banking rankings post, and a large share of them ask some version of the same question: "I want to recruit for investment banking, and I'm particularly interested in healthcare or biotech. What should I actually be doing to prepare?"

The rankings post came from a specific frustration. There is a lot of incomplete or flat-out wrong information on this site about which healthcare banks are actually good, and there is a reflexive bias toward M&A that I don't think serves most students particularly well. This post comes from the same place: trying to explain how this corner of banking actually works to people who have not yet had a reason to know.

The other reason I wanted to write this is that these are all things I wish somebody had explained to me early on. When I was recruiting almost ten years ago, I didn't come from one of the schools where everyone around me had been preparing for Wall Street since freshman orientation, and most of what I learned came from WSO. To be frank, this site was much more useful back then than it is today. The quality of posts has declined pretty meaningfully over the past decade, and I don't see many people taking the time to write out this type of guidance anymore. Similar to the rankings post, I see this as a way of giving back and creating the resource I wish I could have handed to my stupid 19- or 20-year-old self.

One note on how this was written: I was driving out on Long Island this weekend ahead of Labor Day Weekend, was alone in the car and had roughly two hours to kill. I figured I might as well use the time productively, so I dictated into AI basically every thought I had about recruiting: things I wish I had known as a sophomore, mistakes I see candidates make, what happens behind the scenes, what students should study, how group placement works, and a bunch of other random points. AI then organized that two-hour brain dump into something coherent and easier to follow, which I then gave a read through and made direct edits/additions where necessary.

So if parts of this read a little AI-written, that is exactly why. The underlying thoughts, opinions and stories are all mine; the structure and cleanup are not. Otherwise, there is approximately a 0% chance I would have had the time or patience to sit down and type something this long from scratch, and I would rather be transparent about that and still put the resource out there.

This also started as a post specifically about recruiting for healthcare investment banking. The more I talked through it, though, the more I realized that much of the advice applies to investment banking recruiting generally: choosing an office, understanding recruiting pipelines, networking, internal trackers, first-choice preferences, group placement, interview preparation and so on. So I broadened the title. The post should be useful to anyone recruiting for banking or preparing for group placement, but it is still written with a very obvious healthcare bent because that is the field I know best.

The primary audience is current sophomores about to recruit for summer analyst roles. It should also be useful to summer analysts in generalist programs, incoming full-time analysts who will go through group placement, and anyone trying to make a particular industry or office preference known.

And yes, it applies to non-target students. It is harder coming from a non-target; that is simply reality. That said, having done this for a number of years, I honestly tend to prefer non-target candidates. There is often more grit and more of a chip on their shoulder because they had to fight harder to get into the room. Obviously that is a broad generalization, and there are phenomenal and terrible candidates from every school. The point is that being at a non-target does not remotely mean you are screwed. You just need to be more deliberate.

One final point before getting into the guide: I think investment banking remains one of the best wealth-building opportunities available to a 21- or 22-year-old. The sad part is that I also think AI is going to replace a meaningful amount of junior work. My personal view is that, within the next few years, banks are going to realize they can operate with dramatically fewer analysts.

So if you receive a legitimate banking offer, I would take it very seriously. Worry less about marginal brand-name differences and more about getting your foot in the door. Take every legitimate advantage you can find—a school pipeline, a club connection, a family relationship, an office where people are already rooting for you or a group that wants you. There may be materially fewer seats available in the future, and I'll come back to that point throughout the guide.

What this guide covers

1. Figuring out whether you actually want this
2. How investment banking coverage groups and offices are structured
3. Choosing the bank, group and office strategically
4. The one-pipeline rule and other application mechanics
5. Building a target list
6. Researching a firm and its deals
7. How recruiting works behind the scenes
8. Networking strategically and using HR correctly
9. The three questions you need to nail
10. What to read, including the highest-ROI resource most students ignore
11. Biotech technicals, pipeline pages and modeling
12. The 400 Questions trap and how to use AI correctly
13. Your resume, your background and being memorable
14. How to approach group placement
15. The recruiting calendar I would follow
16. Exits and other things to know about biopharma

1. Figure out whether you actually want this

Before you build a target list or send a single email, ask yourself whether you are genuinely interested in healthcare, biotech, biopharma or whatever other coverage area you think you want. If you are, lean into it. Real sector conviction is a meaningful advantage because it is usually obvious when somebody has it and when somebody does not.

The easiest way to test this is to start reading. Follow the news for a few weeks. Read about companies, clinical trials, transactions, regulation and whatever else catches your attention. If you find yourself genuinely curious about why a clinical readout moved a stock 40%, that is a good sign. If every article feels like homework, that is useful information too, and it is better to learn it now than during your second year as an analyst.

Everyone will ask why investment banking. If you are applying to a specific coverage group, somebody will also ask why that industry. For healthcare, expect "Why healthcare?" and, with a life sciences-heavy team, probably "Why biotech?" You need a credible story.

The answers I hear most often are that the interest connects to the candidate's major, that a family member had a health condition and a particular drug or treatment changed the outcome, that the candidate was previously pre-med, or that they simply love the science. All of those can work. The other category is the person who does not really know why and tries to bullshit an answer in real time. That is generally obvious.

Your story does not need to be a heartbreaking movie plot, and you should not invent one. It just needs to be specific and believable enough that the interviewer thinks you have a real reason for being there. Prepare it in advance and practice it out loud until it sounds like a thought rather than a recitation.

2. Understand how investment banking coverage groups and offices are structured

Before deciding where to apply, you need a basic understanding of how investment banks are actually organized.

At most large banks, industry coverage is verticalized. You will have groups covering areas such as healthcare, technology, industrials, consumer and retail, financial institutions, energy, real estate, media and communications, and so on. New York is usually the closest thing to the complete menu: at a large bank, most or all of the major coverage groups will generally have a meaningful presence there.

Outside New York, the office structure can be much narrower. A regional office may only have a handful of major groups, often based on the local business ecosystem or the history of that particular franchise. A West Coast office may be concentrated in technology and life sciences. Houston is obviously associated with energy. Another office may have a particularly strong industrials, consumer, financial institutions or healthcare team but little presence in several other industries.

This matters because you are often not applying to some theoretical nationwide version of the bank. You are applying to a particular office with a particular set of teams and junior seats. If you apply to a non-New York office, make sure the coverage group you claim to love is actually represented there.

Staffing models can also differ:

• Some banks run highly integrated national groups, with juniors in one office regularly working on deals led from another.
• Some groups cross-staff occasionally but still give most work to juniors in the same office.
• Some offices and teams are relatively siloed, and your experience is driven heavily by the bankers physically located there.
• Some internships are fully generalist, while others are limited to a small set of industries represented in that office.
• Some banks hire directly into a specific coverage group, while others wait until after the internship or full-time training period to place you.

You need to understand which model you are entering because it affects both the interview and the actual job. A student interviewing for a national generalist program should prepare differently from someone interviewing directly into a sector-specific office.

How healthcare fits into this structure

Healthcare itself is not one monolithic industry group. Depending on the bank, it may include:

• Biopharma / biotech / life sciences
• Specialty pharma
• Healthcare services
• Medtech
• Tools and diagnostics
• Managed care and payors

As bankers become more senior, they usually specialize further. Somebody may spend most of their career covering biotech, specialty pharma, physician practice management, medical devices, tools and diagnostics or another relatively narrow slice of the broader healthcare market.

The three major healthcare banking hubs are generally New York, San Francisco and Boston, although the strength and composition of each office vary materially by firm. New York usually offers the broadest range of healthcare subsectors. San Francisco is particularly important for biotech, life sciences and healthcare technology. Boston is a major life sciences ecosystem, but fewer banks maintain a full banking presence there than students sometimes assume.

My own bent is obviously toward biopharma, but I think there is value in getting broader exposure early. Healthcare services gives you experience with companies that generate current revenue and EBITDA, sponsor activity, leverage and more conventional valuation frameworks. Those are useful muscles to develop. That said, services is not for everyone, and I personally think biotech is much more exciting.

Generalist banks, direct-to-group programs and specialist firms

Broadly, you will encounter several different models for how banks structure their internship and analyst programs:

• Generalist programs: You join a broad analyst or intern pool, work across groups and go through placement later.
• Office-specific or sector-limited programs: You may technically be a generalist within the office, but the office itself only covers two or three industries.
• Direct-to-group hiring: You recruit specifically for healthcare, technology, industrials or another team from the beginning.
• Specialist platforms: The entire firm, or a very large share of it, is built around one industry.

One misconception I had when I was in your shoes was that a single-industry bank was inherently second tier. After doing this for many years, I have come to see it very differently. The strongest specialist firms routinely compete with—and sometimes beat—much larger banks for the most important IPOs and M&A assignments in their industries.

Some of these firms are among the strongest platforms in their respective niches—essentially the predominant single-industry elite boutiques, as WSO likes to call them. In healthcare, the obvious example is Leerink Partners. In technology, you have Qatalyst Partners. In media and communications, you have firms such as LionTree and Raine.

Every industry also has smaller specialist firms. In healthcare, where I am most familiar, that includes MTS Health Partners, Aquilo, TripleTree and Locust Walk, among others.

The point is not that every focused bank is equally strong. It is that a diversified platform is not automatically superior to a specialist with much deeper relationships in the exact sector you want.

3. Choose the bank, group and office strategically

Students tend to think, "I want Bank X." A better way to think is: "I want Bank X, Office Y, and potentially Group Z." Those can be completely different recruiting processes and completely different jobs.

Before applying anywhere, figure out:

• Which industry groups are actually present in the office
• Whether juniors cross-staff with other offices
• Whether the internship is generalist, sector-limited or group-specific
• Whether placement occurs during or after the internship
• Whether you are entering an office pipeline, school pipeline, group pipeline or some combination of the three

The same bank can recruit very differently by office, particularly at elite boutiques. This is something you can usually figure out through the firm's presentation at your school, the actual internship posting or networking calls with people in the relevant office.

Evercore is a good example. Its New York internship program is broadly generalist, with group placement occurring after the internship. Its Menlo Park office, by contrast, has specific internship processes for technology and, separately, healthcare. If you are interviewing for one of those Menlo Park programs, the process, conversations and eventual internship exposure are going to be much more sector-specific than they are in the New York generalist process.

Centerview is another example. New York runs a more generalist internship, its San Francisco presence is heavily concentrated in life sciences and biotech, and its Menlo Park office is focused on technology. The broader point is not that every student needs to memorize Centerview's office map. It is that two applications to the same firm can represent materially different jobs. Also, as an aside, see here for a post I made on why Centerview wins basically every biotech sellside.

Some specialist platforms take the segmentation one step further. Leerink, from what I understand, bifurcates all their juniors including interns into specific verticals (biopharma and healthcare services) rather than treating their junior class as one undifferentiated healthcare pool. That makes it even more important to know which vertical you are interviewing for and to be well-versed in that specific part of healthcare.

The broader point is simple: research the specific office and program, not just the logo on the building.

The New York math is harder than people realize

I love New York and I think it is probably the best city in America to spend your 20s and early 30s, which is exactly why it is the most sought-after destination among interns/analysts. What many students do not realize is that the same popularity makes their odds of getting a New York seat materially worse.

The exact numbers differ by bank and year, but the rough dynamic can look like New York receiving something like 80% of applications while holding only 60% of the seats. Meanwhile, the West Coast, Boston and other offices might receive the other 20% of applications while collectively accounting for much of the remaining 40%. These are illustrative rather than universal statistics, but the mismatch is real.

You do not need to be a quant to understand what that does to your odds. Recruiting is ultimately a numbers game, so take every legitimate advantage you can find, and you should take the path of least resistance.

A real pipeline changes the entire game

If your school, student organization or alumni network has a strong pipeline into a particular office or group, take it extremely seriously.

When you recruit through a real pipeline, you are not simply another anonymous person arriving at a Superday. You may have an actual group of people inside the process who know you, are rooting for you and have some reputational investment in seeing candidates from their school, club or office succeed.

I have seen decisions come down to two candidates where one student may have been marginally better in isolation, but the other student had multiple members of the recruiting team advocating for them through an established pipeline and ultimately received the offer. Hiring decisions are often close, fit is subjective, and people trust candidates who have already been diligenced by colleagues they know. Recruiting with a real internal constituency behind you is a completely different ballgame from submitting a cold application into the New York pool.

That support can continue after you receive the internship. At large bulge-bracket platforms with huge intern classes, some interns get placed on excellent live deals while others struggle to find meaningful work. Alumni and recruiting-team members often look out for the people they helped bring in, pull them onto strong staffings, make sure they are not left in the dust and advocate for them during return-offer discussions.

A pipeline can therefore help you:

• Get the first-round interview
• Reach the Superday
• Win a close intern offer decision
• Receive stronger staffings during the internship
• Get help when you are struggling
• Earn the return offer

This is why I tell nearly every student I mentor: if your school has a genuinely strong pipeline into San Francisco, Boston or another office, use it unless you have a real personal reason not to.

If I were a student today, dead set on New York but attending a target with a materially stronger pipeline into Boston, I would seriously consider Boston. Even if New York remained my long-term preference, my immediate goal would be to get the internship, perform well and receive a return offer.

San Francisco teams often have strong Berkeley and Stanford pipelines; Los Angeles teams have strong USC and UCLA pipelines; Boston teams may recruit heavily from Harvard, MIT, BC and other regional schools. Some individual groups simply have a cluster of alumni from one school or student organization and a strong desire to help their own. If you identify that advantage, do not discard it because another ZIP code seems marginally more prestigious.

For smaller offices, also be prepared to explain why you genuinely want that city. Teams often try to determine whether you actually want San Francisco, Boston or another market, or whether you are using it as a side door and plan to demand New York immediately. If you have family, friends, school ties or another real connection, or if it’s your dream city then make that clear. 

The broader lesson is: get your foot in the door. If your dream is ultimately New York but you have a materially better chance at a great bank in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Dallas or Los Angeles, I would take the banking job. Internal mobility differs by firm, but from what I have seen, strong analysts are often able to move offices after a few years or around the associate promotion. Moving later as a proven banker is generally easier than standing outside the industry with no offer because Manhattan was the only location you would consider.

I think that becomes even more important as recruiting gets harder. I do not see the process becoming materially easier, and over the longer term I suspect AI will reduce at least some of the junior headcount banks historically needed. Use the advantages available to you now.

4. Understand the one-pipeline rule and application mechanics

This may be the highest-value mechanical point in the entire post because a surprising number of students do not understand it.

Most banks operate multiple recruiting pipelines. Offices can have their own process, school teams can have their own process, groups may have their own process, and non-target candidates may sit in another pool. Sometimes those pipelines overlap; sometimes they are almost completely separate.

Suppose you attend Wharton but want West Coast. The Wharton recruiting team may be composed mostly of New York bankers and naturally feed candidates into New York. If you want the West Coast, make that preference known early and ask who actually runs that process. Sometimes a school team will screen you initially and then hand you to the other office; sometimes you need to enter the office pipeline more directly.

The reverse can happen at Berkeley, where the natural alumni pod may skew West Coast even though plenty of Berkeley students want New York. Some banks do a better job coordinating dual-office processes from an individual school—i.e. J.P. Morgan—but you should not assume every bank does. The system is not going to infer your preferences for you. Communicate them.

Now the big myth: applications often ask you to rank several offices, and students assume that listing three cities gives them three shots on goal. At many banks, it does not.

Unless somebody explicitly tells you otherwise, assume your first choice is the office that will actually consider you. Firms generally do not want two or three offices running parallel processes for the same student and then fighting over who gets to extend the offer.

I still remember filling out applications and putting down something like:

• 70% New York
• 20% Chicago
• 10% Boston

I genuinely thought I was entering three different processes and that three opportunities were better than one. Luckily, I was a knucklehead without getting completely screwed by it. But if I had casually put Chicago first—whether because I alphabetized the list or assumed all three offices would review me—I may never have started my career in New York, and my entire career trajectory could have looked different.

I later learned that nobody was meaningfully considering me for all three locations. I was being routed into one process.

Do not think of your ranked choices as three lottery tickets in three different pools. In most cases, you are getting one ticket and choosing which drawing it enters.

The same logic can apply to group preferences on an internship application unless you are in a formal post-internship group placement process. Be extremely thoughtful about what you rank first. Treat the second and third choices as potentially decorative rather than assuming they carry equal weight.

5. Build a real target list

Before sending random networking emails, build a strategy and decide which firms you actually care about. If healthcare or biotech is the goal, my earlier healthcare rankings post is a decent starting point for identifying which groups have meaningful franchises rather than simply relying on generic WSO prestige labels.

If I were a student today wanting to go into healthcare, and specifically biotech, firms I would look at include Centerview, Goldman Sachs, Evercore, Leerink Partners, Jefferies, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, TD Cowen, Lazard, Guggenheim, Moelis and MTS Health Partners, among others.

That is not meant to be a definitive ranking within this post or a promise that every office at every firm offers the same experience. The point is to identify groups with real healthcare activity and then understand why each belongs on your own list.

There are also additional industry-focused and middle-market healthcare boutiques worth targeting, including Cain Brothers / KeyBanc Capital Markets, Aquilo Partners, Locust Walk, Tungsten Partners and TripleTree.

Ask yourself what you are actually optimizing for:

• Biotech M&A
• ECM and financing experience
• Broad healthcare exposure
• Sponsor-driven services work
• A smaller analyst class
• A particular city
• Specific senior bankers
• A direct-to-group experience
• A generalist program that preserves optionality

"Good bank" is not a complete recruiting strategy.

6. Research the firm and its deals

Once you have a target list, go deeper on each firm. Before a networking call or interview, you should understand:

• What the healthcare or relevant coverage group actually does
• Which subsectors it covers
• Whether the franchise is weighted more toward M&A, ECM or both
• Who some of the relevant senior bankers are
• Which recent transactions or financings the group has worked on
• What employees say differentiates the platform

LinkedIn is especially useful for understanding who the senior people are, where they came from and how the franchise developed. Firm websites, press releases, WSO, news coverage and AI can all help organize the picture.

Your pitch should reflect the actual franchise. Students overwhelmingly talk about M&A because WSO has trained them to think anything else is second class. For the record, I personally prefer M&A too. But ECM is a huge part of biotech banking and can provide genuinely valuable experience. If you are speaking to a financing-heavy platform, show that you understand and respect that business. If the group is more M&A-weighted, understand why it wins those assignments. Meet the firm where it actually lives rather than delivering the same generic speech everywhere.

Networking calls are partly a way to harvest differentiators. Ask people what their experience at the firm has been, what makes the group different from competitors and which deals they found most interesting. You are gathering the language and examples you will later need when somebody asks, "Why this bank?"

It is much more convincing to say, "Two people I spoke with both emphasized X, and one of them described Y transaction as a good example," than to repeat a sentence from the careers website.

If you mention one of our deals, know the deal

Referencing a transaction is a good way to show that you did your homework. It is also a good way to blow up an interview.

If the bank worked on the deal, know it extremely well because the person across from you may have been staffed on it. I will often ask follow-up questions about a transaction a candidate introduces specifically to determine whether they actually studied it or simply read a headline.

At a minimum, know:

• The consideration and transaction structure
• Who bought whom
• Who advised each side
• The strategic rationale
• The important assets or products
• Where those assets were in development
• How the market reacted

Read the announcement, contemporaneous news and relevant equity research. If you want to go a level deeper, pull the merger proxy or 14D-9 and read the background of the transaction and the financial analyses.

You do not need to know the deal like the analyst who lived through it for four months. But never voluntarily introduce a topic into an interview that you cannot discuss comfortably.

7. Understand how recruiting works behind the scenes

This was almost completely opaque to me as a student, and understanding it changes how you should behave.

Banks generally prioritize their established target-school pipelines. Those schools often have dedicated teams that review candidates and allocate first-round spots. Non-target resumes may enter a separate pool reviewed by HR, junior bankers or a smaller group of people, sometimes including bankers who themselves came from non-targets. The exact allocation varies by firm, but the basic structure is common: some interview slots are effectively earmarked for core schools and the remainder come from a broader pool.

Your school, GPA, internships and resume matter. Their primary job, however, is getting you to the interview stage.

Once you are actually in a first round, second round or Superday, those credentials matter much, much less. At that point, the primary thing carrying you forward is your actual interview performance.

If one candidate has a 4.0 and another has a 3.6, but the student with the 3.6 crushes my questions and the student with the 4.0 does not, the 3.6 candidate is moving forward. The 4.0 may have helped secure the first-round interview, but it does not answer the questions once the interview begins.

At many banks there is also some form of recruiting tracker—an Excel sheet, CRM or similar system—where bankers record interactions with candidates. After a networking call, somebody may log when they spoke with you, what they thought and whether they recommend moving you forward.

So assume every interaction is at least partially an interview:

• Coffee chats
• Phone calls
• Information sessions
• Campus events
• Follow-up emails
• Informal conversations with bankers

If somebody thinks you are sharp and easy to work with, they may write, "This kid needs a first round."

If somebody finds you robotic, arrogant, rude or incredibly annoying, that can and will be recorded too. I have seen strong candidates on paper get effectively nerfed because somebody put a blunt note in the tracker saying something along the lines of "too robotic," "annoying" or "do not interview." If somebody on the recruiting team had a sufficiently bad interaction with you, the rest of the team will usually take that seriously.

Treat every conversation seriously. That does not mean you should act like a scripted robot—ironically, that can be the problem—but you should assume what happens on the call will not disappear when the call ends.

This is especially important for non-target candidates. A strong resume can occasionally get pulled from the pile with no prior interaction, but you should not build your strategy around being the one miraculous resume everybody notices. Often, all it takes is one internal person saying, "I spoke with this candidate; bump them into the first round."

8. Network strategically and use HR correctly

Start by figuring out who is actually involved in recruiting. One mistake I made was assuming I needed to speak with every person at the bank or, at minimum, every alum from my school. You do not. It wastes your time and theirs.

If bankers come to campus, pay attention to the names on the screen and the people attending the event. Speak with them and ask directly, "Who else on the recruiting team would you recommend I talk to?" Work through that list rather than cold-emailing the entire organization. If nobody connected to your school sits in the industry or office you want, say so and ask to be routed to the right people.

For non-target candidates, look for bankers who came through similar paths. The connection can be the same college, but it could also be a similar hometown, high school, student experience, prior internship or simply the fact that both of you recruited without a formal pipeline. There is often real camaraderie among non-target bankers, and many are inclined to give another non-target student a serious look.

Who matters by level

Analysts and associates are often the people most involved day to day. They manage trackers, conduct networking calls, review resumes and participate in first rounds. Do not ignore them because you think only MDs matter.

At the same time, one genuinely strong conversation with a VP, principal, director or MD can be disproportionately useful. A senior banker saying, "Make sure this person gets interviewed," can carry weight. The key word is genuinely. Do not interpret this as advice to cold-email the global head of healthcare six times.

What to ask on a networking call

Do not spend the entire call asking what a banker's day-to-day schedule looks like and leave with nothing useful. Ask questions such as:

• What has your experience at the firm been like?
• What makes the group different from its competitors?
• Which deals have you found most interesting?
• What do juniors actually get exposure to?
• Why did you choose the firm?
• Why have you stayed?

You are collecting firm-specific information that will later make your answers much more credible.

HR is useful, but not in the way students assume

When I attended recruiting events, some of the largest lines were usually around the HR or campus recruiting representative. Students see a title like "Global Head of Campus Recruiting" and assume that person is basically Roger Goodell running the summer analyst draft. They have one pleasant conversation and walk away thinking they have practically guaranteed themselves a first-round pick.

At many firms, that is not how it works.

HR and campus recruiting are enormously important operationally, but they generally are not the people deciding whether Candidate A advances over Candidate B. Those individual decisions are usually driven heavily by bankers, often relatively junior ones.

HR manages applications, timelines, interview scheduling, communications, logistics and the overall process. They are also extremely useful as a routing mechanism:

• Do not know who leads recruiting for your school? Ask HR.
• Do not know who runs the West Coast process? Ask HR.
• No healthcare bankers are connected to your school? Ask who leads healthcare recruiting.
• Confused about which application corresponds to which office? Ask.
• Coming from a non-target and unable to identify a natural contact? Explain your interest and ask HR to connect you with somebody in the relevant group.

Just do not spend all your time trying to impress HR while ignoring the bankers who will actually evaluate and advocate for candidates.

Stay warm without becoming annoying

Suppose you have a great conversation in October and applications open in February. That person has probably spoken with dozens of students since then and may barely remember you. When you apply, reply on the same email thread and let them know. If you have a real reason to follow up—a company you discussed, a relevant transaction or a meaningful update—use it.

You do not need to email every two weeks asking whether there are updates. The goal is to remain recognizable without becoming the candidate everyone recognizes for the wrong reason.

9. Nail the three recurring healthcare questions

Beyond the standard banking behaviorals—walk me through your resume, why banking, why this bank, why this office and so on—there are three areas I would expect almost every serious healthcare candidate to prepare.

1. Why healthcare or life sciences?

This is the story discussed earlier. Have a real reason, make it specific and be able to explain why healthcare banking makes sense as the intersection of that interest and your broader career goals. Do not wait until the interview to invent it.

2. What healthcare trend or story are you following?

You can answer with almost any part of healthcare: insurers, regulation, private equity consolidation, hospitals, medtech or something else. But if you want to impress a biopharma banker, a specific biotech therapeutic area or modality is usually more interesting.

The more niche and informed you can be, the more it signals that you actually follow the space. Autoimmune, CAR-T and cell therapy, psychedelics, rare disease, radiopharmaceuticals, ADCs, CNS or gene editing could all work if you genuinely understand the topic. The point is not to choose the strangest possible answer; it is to have something you can defend.

If somebody simply tells me "GLP-1s," I will usually ask them to tell me something else. GLP-1s are obviously important, but the answer is now so common that merely naming them does not demonstrate much independent interest. If that genuinely is your topic, know enough to go meaningfully beyond the headline.

3. Tell me about a company you find interesting

Have two companies you can discuss intelligently for roughly three to five minutes each. Three is probably overkill; two is the real floor.

For each company, understand:

• What it does
• Its lead asset or broader pipeline
• The relevant disease area
• Where the asset sits in development
• How the asset is differentiated
• Why you personally find the story interesting

You do not need to sound like the covering research analyst. You just need enough depth that the entire thesis does not collapse after the first follow-up question. The next section is the fastest way I know to build that depth.

10. Read consistently, and use the highest-ROI resource most students ignore

For biotech news, the resources I would start with are:

• STAT News
• Endpoints News
• Fierce Biotech
• Twitter

Keep a general awareness of the major M&A deals, important data readouts and occasional wild stories in the industry because those naturally come up in conversation.

Read consistently rather than binging the week before an interview. The goal is to develop pattern recognition: which therapeutic areas are hot, which companies matter, what investors are debating and why particular developments move stocks.

Equity research is the biggest cheat code

Many universities provide access to resources such as Bloomberg, FactSet, Capital IQ/S&P NetAdvantage, PitchBook or other financial databases. Figure out what your school offers and, specifically, where you can access sell-side equity research.

If you actually want to understand a company well enough to discuss it in an interview, equity research is one of the best places to start. Within the research stack, the single most useful document is usually the initiating coverage report.

An initiation is the first major report an analyst publishes when beginning coverage, so it often needs to explain the entire company from scratch. It can be 40, 50 or even 90-plus pages and may cover: Company history, pipeline, lead drug and mechanism of action, disease background and standard of care, competing therapies, total addressable market, etc.

Pick the two companies you want to discuss, find good initiating reports and read them properly. In my opinion, this is among the highest returns per hour anywhere in the recruiting process. Almost no sophomore does it, and the candidates who do tend to sound completely different.

11. Learn the biotech technicals, pipeline pages and modeling

You still need the standard investment banking technicals:

• Accounting
• Enterprise value versus equity value
• DCFs
• Comparable companies
• Precedent transactions
• Basic M&A
• Basic accretion and dilution concepts

Healthcare, and especially biotech, adds another layer.

Learn the drug-development process

You should understand, at a high level, how a drug goes from an idea through discovery and preclinical work, into Phase I, Phase II and Phase III trials, through the regulatory process and ultimately to approval.

You do not need a PhD or an exhaustive understanding of trial design. You do need the basic vocabulary of the sector and an understanding of why the same drug generally becomes more valuable as clinical and regulatory risk are removed.

Also spend time looking at actual company pipeline pages. Pull up the pipeline chart on a biotech company's website and make sure you can understand it.

Understand why biotech valuation is different

Many biopharma companies are pre-revenue. They may have no approved product, no EBITDA and no operating profit, sometimes for years. That means the standard valuation reflexes students learn cannot simply be applied without modification.

You should conceptually understand:

• Enterprise value versus equity value
• Risk-adjusted DCF or rNPV
• Sum-of-the-parts analysis
• Comparable companies
• Precedent transactions
• Pipeline valuation
• Probability of clinical success
• Peak sales

I do not want to provide a complete answer key here because part of preparing is learning to connect the dots yourself. The question to ask is: what happens to the normal valuation methods when the company has no revenue today?

What exactly are you comparing in the comp set? What are you projecting in the DCF? Why do future cash flows need to be probability-adjusted? what does the cap structure say about the company? If you understand how the normal framework changes when the underlying company is pre-revenue, you are much further along than somebody who simply memorized a list of methodologies.

One specific trap: do not list an LBO as a central way to value a pre-revenue biotech company. LBOs are highly relevant in healthcare services, where businesses generate cash flow and can support leverage. They are generally not the right framework for a development-stage biotech with no cash flow. Know which side of healthcare you are discussing.

Understand a basic drug revenue build

The other thing I would expect a well-prepared student to walk me through is how to build a drug revenue forecast. If I ask how you would get from a disease to estimated revenue, you should understand the general logic of an epidemiological build: starting with the relevant patient population and moving through the steps needed to arrive at an addressable and treated population and ultimately estimated revenue.

I am not expecting a sophomore to build a fully functioning commercial model in the interview. I am trying to see whether you understand how the pieces connect rather than jumping immediately to a random peak-sales number. The modeling resources below are useful precisely because they teach you how to make that bridge from patient population to revenue.

Modeling resources

I believe I used Breaking Into Wall Street's pharma/biotech materials when I recruited, back when the version was much older. The course has been updated many times since, and analysts and associates I have worked with over the years have generally spoken highly of it. It is useful for pipeline valuation, drug revenue forecasts, pricing and the broader logic of biotech modeling.

Pharmagellan is another resource worth reviewing.

Biotech modeling is genuinely different, in the same way oil and gas modeling is different for people recruiting into Houston energy. Getting real reps on one pharma or biotech model can give you a meaningful leg up.

It has also been roughly a decade since I went through undergraduate recruiting, so there are almost certainly excellent healthcare and biopharma courses or case studies that I have never seen. If anybody knows of good ones, please add them in the comments so this can become a better living resource.

12. Caution with the 400 Questions Guide, and use AI correctly

The usual 400 Questions guide is a very useful resource. Use it. The mistake is memorizing question types and answer sequences without understanding the concepts underneath them.

When I was more junior and conducted more technical interviews, one of the main things I tried to determine was whether a candidate knew the answer because they understood it or because they had memorized it. The test is easy: ask a standard question, get the standard answer and then go one level deeper.

• Why do we do that step?
• Why does the relationship work that way?
• What changes if one assumption changes?
• Could you reason through a version of the question you have not seen before?

A candidate who memorized the sequence can fall apart after two follow-ups. A candidate who understands the concept can reason through a variation they have never seen.

Students today have a ridiculous advantage here: AI is effectively a 24/7 tutor. Ask it to explain why a concept works, explain it more simply, create unfamiliar variations and keep asking questions until it exposes a hole in your understanding. Do not use AI merely to get answers faster. Use it to interrogate the why behind each step until you could reconstruct the answer from first principles.

What I would avoid are real-time AI interview platforms that listen to the conversation and feed answers back to you. Analysts and associates have come out of interviews convinced candidates were using them. The tells can include eye movements toward another part of the screen, a consistent delay before every answer, responses that are strangely polished and generic, and an inability to handle natural follow-ups.

Maybe those tools eventually become impossible to detect. For now, I think using one is a stupid risk. Use AI to become better at interviewing; do not use it to interview for you.

13. Make your resume reinforce the story, and be a human being

A good GPA matters, but plenty of candidates in the pile have one. For healthcare groups, demonstrated interest in science and medicine can help differentiate a resume when nobody at the firm has spoken with you yet.

That could include:

• A biology, chemistry, neuroscience or biomedical engineering major or minor
• Pre-med coursework
• Lab or clinical research
• Hospital volunteering
• A pharma or biotech internship
• Work at a healthcare startup
• Another experience that shows a legitimate interest in the field

None of this is mandatory, and you should not change your major because an anonymous banker on WSO told you to. But if you already have that background, make sure it is visible.

Healthcare teams often have an affinity for pre-med and science candidates because the background validates the interest and, frankly, finance is relatively teachable. Scientific intuition can be harder. Some of the best hires I have seen came from traditional science backgrounds rather than undergraduate finance programs. They still need to learn the banking skills, but they may be less far behind than they think, especially now that AI makes it easier to learn unfamiliar scientific concepts on the job.

Put the weird thing in your interests section

The interests section matters more than students think. I have pulled candidates out of a pile partly because something there gave me a reason to remember them.

I am a Star Trek fan. I once came across a resume where the candidate listed Star Trek, asked about it and ended up spending an absurd share of the interview talking with him about Star Trek: Discovery, which had just been released, and how much canon it was breaking at the time. It was one of the better interviews I can remember, and he ultimately got hired. He later told me he had debated removing it because he thought it sounded too nerdy.

Put the thing down. Your quirks may be the only part of the resume that does not look like everybody else's. There are endless candidates with strong GPAs, finance clubs and similar internships. Do not manufacture a personality, but do not sand yourself into a generic candidate out of fear either. The generic candidate is the one who gets forgotten.

14. Approach group placement like a real recruiting process

A lot of people reading this will land in a generalist summer program and then be placed into a coverage group for full time. Generalist programs have real pros and cons.

The benefit is that you get exposure to several industries before committing. You may arrive convinced that healthcare is your dream, get staffed on a few biotech projects and realize you hate it. You may then work on a technology or industrials deal and discover that it is much more your jam.

The downside is that you have to go through another recruiting process after already winning the internship. The last thing you want is to have a bad day, flunk the placement process and end up doing "equities in Dallas." (Shout-out to Liar's Poker, which is another book every junior should read.)

If you think you want healthcare, make that preference known early. In the first week or two, tell the intern staffer clearly that you are interested in healthcare or life sciences and would appreciate relevant staffings where possible. Staffers are not mind readers, and people are often strangely hesitant to state a preference.

Then build a relationship with the team directly:

• Get coffee with healthcare bankers
• Ask thoughtful questions
• Do genuinely good work when staffed with them
• Be useful and responsive
• Make your interest visible without becoming overbearing

Group placement is a two-way process: you need to want the group, but the group also needs to want you. If the team has spent the summer working with you and sees you as a strong analyst, you are in a much better position than the intern who appears during placement week and announces a lifelong passion for healthcare.

Also expect the actual placement process to test the substance discussed in this guide. Depending on the bank, it can involve real conversations about why healthcare, companies and trends, drug development and biotech valuation. It is not necessarily a formality simply because you already interned at the firm.

15. Treat recruiting like an additional three-credit course

The ideal time to begin networking is during a genuinely slow period, such as the summer before sophomore year. That is when bankers are least likely to be drowning in student outreach, and it gives you time to develop a relationship and follow up naturally during the fall.

Most students do not follow that advice. They begin once the school year starts or once everybody in the finance club begins talking about applications. That is still fine, but the second-best time to start is now.

The biggest advice I give freshmen who reach out to me is to treat investment banking recruiting as an additional three-credit course during sophomore fall. That is roughly the amount of time and seriousness it requires when you combine Networking calls, Email outreach and follow-ups, and preparing for technicals

Start studying technicals now and devote at least a few hours each week to them. Do not wait until October or November and assume you can cram everything once an interview appears on your calendar.

I know this is difficult. Students have school, friends, clubs, parties and an actual life. But eventually you have to ask yourself how badly you want the job. You are competing against thousands of other students, including some who are going to treat recruiting with exactly this level of seriousness. 

And if AI reduces the number of junior seats as much as I think it will, the process may become even less forgiving. Frankly, I am not sure I would have been able to break in as easily if I were competing in the environment I expect students to face a few years from now.

Most students will not do that, and many will not seriously begin technical preparation until October or November. If that is you, Thanksgiving and winter break need to become serious study periods. 

Put your head down and study. 

I know that sounds harsh. You want to see friends from high school, go out, decompress and recover from the semester. But you are competing against thousands of students, and some of them are going to take this advice seriously. When interviews arrive, the offer frequently goes to the person who knows the material, can answer the follow-ups and clearly put in the work.

By November, January comes incredibly quickly. Once the first major bank opens its application, the others tend to follow, and the process can move from nothing to multiple interviews and Superdays within a few weeks. By the time recruiting starts, you want to be polishing rather than learning what enterprise value means for the first time.

At a high level, this is the schedule I would follow:

• Summer before sophomore year: Begin light networking, build your target list and start following the industry.
• Sophomore fall: Treat recruiting like an additional course. Network consistently and study technicals every week.
• Thanksgiving and winter break: Fill every remaining technical gap and practice until the concepts are automatic.
• Once applications begin opening: Be ready immediately. Continue keeping relationships warm, but this should be execution and polish—not the first time you learn the material.

16. Biopharma exits and other things to know about biopharma

Biopharma is structurally different from most other industries, and that affects both the work you do as a banker and the exits available to you.

Traditional buyout private equity is not the center of the biotech ecosystem. Buyout funds generally want companies with revenue, cash flow and the ability to support debt. A development-stage biotech may have no approved product, no current revenue and years of clinical spending ahead of it. There is usually very little cash flow against which a traditional sponsor can underwrite leverage. The central players are therefore more often biotech and pharmaceutical companies, venture-capital and growth investors, public-market investors, investment banks and strategic or corporate-development teams.

Developing a drug takes years and enormous amounts of capital. A company may need to fund discovery, preclinical work, multiple phases of clinical trials, regulatory preparation and commercial buildout before generating meaningful revenue. Because these businesses cannot depend on existing cash flow or borrow heavily against predictable earnings, they usually finance themselves through equity. That process begins in the private markets and often continues long after the company goes public.

This is one of the biggest differences between biotech and most other industries. For many companies, the IPO is the major equity raise and management hopes not to return to the market repeatedly because of the dilution. In biotech, the IPO is often just one financing in a much longer sequence. Investors generally assume that a company will continue raising capital through follow-ons and other equity financings as it progresses toward its next clinical, regulatory or commercial milestone. A biotech may need to raise before an important data readout, after positive trial results or simply because its remaining cash runway is becoming too short.

That is why ECM is not a sideshow in biopharma. Capital formation is integral to how the industry functions. ECM bankers have to understand and communicate the underlying investment thesis: why the clinical data matter, how the asset differs from competing approaches and the existing standard of care, what the regulatory path looks like, how much cash the company needs and which scientific, clinical and commercial risks investors are being asked to accept.

WSO tends to treat ECM as inferior because the site evaluates exits largely through the lens of traditional buyout private equity. That framework fits pre-revenue biotech poorly. For somebody interested in life sciences venture, growth investing or public markets, biotech ECM experience can be more directly relevant than pure M&A because the work resembles the process of deciding whether a company is worth funding and what milestones it must reach before raising its next round of capital.

You also see how specialized investors evaluate company stories in real time—what they believe, what they challenge and which parts of management’s pitch fall apart under scrutiny. You learn how investors think about clinical data, competitive positioning, upcoming catalysts, valuation, dilution and cash runway. That judgment is central to life sciences investing and can be extremely useful in venture capital, growth investing, public markets, business development or another industry role.

None of this means M&A is unimportant. M&A remains the more direct training ground for modeling, valuation, transaction execution and process management. My point is simply that the relative value of ECM is much higher in biopharma than it is in most other industries. A platform that offers both serious M&A reps and meaningful ECM experience can therefore give you unusually broad optionality across banking, investing and the corporate side.

A short preview of my healthcare bank rankings

My data-driven rankings were published at the beginning of 2026, and I would still put the following five firms at the top of the healthcare list:

1. Centerview: Over the past several years, it has been the dominant biotech sell-side adviser and seems to be on virtually every major process. see here for a post I made on why Centerview wins basically every biotech sellside
2. Goldman Sachs: An elite all-around franchise that is especially strong in M&A, while still leading a meaningful number of equity offerings.
3. Morgan Stanley: Similar to Goldman—stronger in M&A than ECM, but unquestionably a top-tier healthcare platform that still leads plenty of financings.
4. Leerink Partners: The strongest pure biotech platform; in 2026 it was lead-left bookrunner the largest biotech IPO ever and has also advised on several major sell-sides over the past two years.
5. Jefferies: Its trajectory has been phenomenal—Phil Ross has built it into a legitimate No. 2 go-to biotech sell-side adviser alongside their strong ECM arm, and I would not be surprised if Jefferies jumps to second place in the next version of my rankings for early 2027

Evercore, Lazard and Moelis deserve honorable mention among the boutiques with meaningful biopharma M&A businesses. Boutiques generally pay more than bulge brackets and you’ll get more hands on deal experience, but almost none have a real ECM arm. In my opinion Evercore offers the best of both worlds for somebody who wants brand-name, top-tier M&A experience with a small amount of ECM exposure. 

The right platform depends on the work and exits you want. If you are dead set on traditional buyout PE, prioritize M&A and modeling. If you are interested in biopharma investing or broader optionality, do not reflexively dismiss ECM; in this industry, understanding investors and capital formation is part of understanding the company.

Take a look at my rankings to get a more in-depth take on each platform and my data driven ranking methodology.

What I would want ready before interviews

At a high level, I would want:

• The standard banking technicals
• A credible why-banking and why-industry story
• An understanding of the specific bank, office and group
• One or two healthcare trends I could discuss
• Two companies I knew reasonably well
• One or two transactions I had actually studied
• The basic drug-development process
• Familiarity with biotech pipeline pages
• A conceptual understanding of biotech valuation
• A basic understanding of drug revenue builds, TAM, pricing and peak sales
• A clear understanding of which recruiting pipeline I was actually entering

If you can genuinely do all of that as a sophomore, you will be in a very strong position.

Final thoughts

Recruiting becomes much less mysterious once you understand what is happening behind the curtain. The bank is not expecting a 20-year-old to arrive as a finished investment banker. We are basically trying to determine whether you are smart, prepared, genuinely interested, capable of learning and somebody we would be willing to sit next to at 1:30 in the morning.

My strongest advice is to use every legitimate advantage available to you. That could be a family connection, a school pipeline, an alumni pod, a student organization, an office where people are already rooting for you or a group that has shown genuine interest.

Do not throw away that support because you are overly focused on New York or on a marginal difference in brand name. Your first goal is to get the internship. Your second is to receive meaningful staffings and earn the return offer. People tend to help their own, and having advocates inside the firm can matter at every one of those stages.

There are likely to be fewer junior seats over time. If you receive a good banking offer, take it seriously. Get your foot in the door, become good at the job and optimize the bank, group or location later. Internal mobility and lateral recruiting are much easier problems to solve once you have proven you can perform.

Be intentional about your first-choice office. Understand which pipeline you are entering. Network with the people who actually matter. Assume interactions are being tracked. Read initiating coverage reports. Learn the industry. Understand your technicals rather than memorizing them. Use AI to attack the gaps in your knowledge, not to cheat during the interview.

And for the love of God, if you tell me you are passionate about a transaction I worked on, please read about the transaction first.

Hopefully this AI-organized brain dump from my drive out on Long Island makes the process a little easier for somebody. I certainly think my life would have been easier if I had access to a guide like this when I recruited, and hopefully the students who find it useful eventually take the time to help the people coming up behind them too.

I do not check this site every day—probably closer to once every couple of weeks—but feel free to send me a message, as I’ve gotten a ton of them over the past year since creating this account. If you are interested in healthcare or biopharma and deciding between offers, considering a lateral, weighing banking against the buy side or industry, or trying to think through another career decision, I am generally happy to give my honest perspective when I have time and I take people's anonymity seriously. If It’s urgent or time sensitive maybe mention those words and I’ll set up notification filter.

And if anybody has strong healthcare or biopharma modeling courses, case studies, newsletters, interview guides or other resources, post them below. Like the rankings post, I would be happy to treat this as a living resource and continue improving it.

Good luck,
The_Biotech_Banking_Expert