While I truly admire the determination and grind of younger students to land a solid SA role, these freshman hardos need to settle down. Here are a few examples:
1) Last week, I met a first semester freshman who’s “totally full-send IB”. He told me that he dropped $500 on a 2-day financial modeling session (daddy’s money of course) and that he’ll be looking at GS/JPM/MS for his freshman summer.
2) The next day, I encounter yet another freshman hardo on campus. He approaches my friend and I and we all get to talking. Pretty chill guy, the conversation is flowing well, and we crack a few jokes. He then shifts the chat to IB and starts flexing about how much he knows about it, claims that he can “list off every BB and boutique on the street”, and asks to see both of our LinkedIn profiles.
3) Third guy, same week. Claims that he wants to make it to “M&A MD in 5 years and become a millionaire by age 30”. I ask him what “M&A” stands for and the kid literally freezes. Pls fix.
Freshman hardos, at the end of the day, I love to see you grinding, but if you want to be taken seriously, start by taking the lanyard with your school ID and room key off your neck.
I bet you can't name every BB and boutique on the street.
Everyone is a douche in college/uni.
I may be wrong, but I've found the kids who had a few beers and shared some interests to be far more enjoyable to work with than those who were IB geniuses.
I feel like that's a tough dichotomy that's lost on a lot of younger people, you need to grind to get in and move up the first few years but afterwards you can't be a fucking weirdo or else no one wants to develop relationships with you.
Or I'm just totally full of shit.
You're mostly right - the key is in moderation and balance. Although at the analyst level, I feel like social skills take a hard back seat to GPA/hardo mentality.
For instance, fresh/sop year I drank a lot of beer and developed lots of good relationships at school and with university/fraternity alumni in various financial industries. Got a lot of "hey shoot me an email if you're interested in this and that career (including IB)". The catch is that I spent all of my time doing that, had an atrocious GPA, and my "buddies" in the industry couldn't really help me in the end while they hired plenty of 4.0 "nerds". I spent my last 2 years of college miserably married to the library in order to salvage my future.
So if I had a do-over, I'd honestly rather be that 3.8-4.0 gpa, borderline Asperger, triple major "IB genius" who gets interviews with no networking needed.
Sounds like you just weren't good at multitasking.
Had a few hit me with the "let me know if you're interested" emails. But, I did not know you were supposed to know things before you start and got creamed early on because of it.
basically, know the stuff, but don't make it your personality. be a normal person
too tuff for me
What's happening to kids nowadays? Listing BBs and what not... pretty weak sauce.
Back in my day we debated the Black Scholes model with Bankers who came to our school's career fair to show 'em we meant business
why tf would an ibanker debate about the black scholes model
weird flex but ok bro
The whole point of being an I-Banker is you just have to take the theories taught in business schools for cost of equity, option valuation, etc. as gospel because its bank policy because some Delaware court case shows it will hold up in court. Plus your clients will freak out if you start showing them numbers based on some pet theory conflicting with what they learned in b-school. Plagiarism is the essential ingredient of technical work on the banking side unless you are in some kind of thought leadership group, which based on personal experience, I would recommend avoiding as a career path.
Clearly Batman doesn't have any sense of humour
Hahahaha you can't even make this shit up. Do you think these kids will get offers?
Taking a step back, freshmen are literally the youngest/dumbest "adult" there is. Remember, they were very recently the kings/queens of the high school jungle. Now, they enter the real world and are all of a sudden at the bottom of the food chain and everyone older is smarter, richer, more cultured than them! On top of that, everyone older steals their girls :(.
But yes, most of these freshmen will grow out of their douchbaggery or else no, they will not be getting offers and will continue being a douchebag/loser into their careers. Key lessons - Don't be a douche, don't be overly arrogant, and be somewhat likeable. Not super hard.
While being a douchebag isn’t a way to make friends, I don’t think simply being interested in IB at a young age makes you one.
Never Happened.
Lol I wish I could say it didn’t
twas a freshman hardo with the women, until one woman a sternie redirected my major from femenist studies to fuhnance and palladium brunch
You posting is upsetting to see. These students are simply trying to set themselves up with a bright future after college. They are making a huge investment in themselves by going off to school with the price now a days. I don't see an issue with someone reading websites like this, networking, and doing training courses in order to get themselves prepared for interviews and the job. It's very competitive to get these positions and I see freshman making these moves as the right choice many times.
I see your point, but it seems that you may be taking this a tad bit too seriously. Seems like the OP is just making a joke lol
Completely agree
Being an ambitious and active freshman is great, but I think the main problem addressed is simply that these freshmen are attempting to showoff, but are still too inexperienced. These three could have had a genuine conversation with Eminay about pretty much anything of substance (view on financial news, insights on career, hobbies, etc.) and even ask for advice or tips. Instead... they eagerly flex on how much money they dropped, their the names of the firms they read.
Never settle you hardos. Never settle
Born to bank. Born to win.
And what you have all failed to realize is that the OP is a freshman hardo who is showing off how he is better than his friends because he knows what "M&A" stands for, had what he thought was a solid LinkedIn profile (until his friend owned him) and studies finance concepts by reading off of Investopedia (so his friend is dumb for actually having to spend money to learn finance).
i'm assuming you're a student yourself given the amount of interaction you have with freshmen on campus. so ya congrats, you're an upperclassman that's realized he's more mature than kids that have literally been in higher education for 6 weeks.
what a high bar to set, big claps to you my friend
It’s getting harder for me to take sides when everyone in these threads is annoying
Bump
A year later and still relevant. To all you freshman hardos out there, please settle down!
Why? What possible reason could you have for bumping this?
Get a sense of humour bruv
Thoughts
1. OP was sophomore when wrote this
2. OP was a freshman hardo... probably secretly one of the hardos described
3. OP thinks that by writing this post, he is vanquishing the hardo within
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