Starting off, lots of comments?

Here's a timeline for a quick ramp:

Months 1-2: ramp up. You will make a ton of mistakes because you don't know all the mistakes that can be possibly made. Sometimes it's not a mistake but a formatting preference - so you learn to make it look like how they prefer next time instead of how you were taught in training. You will learn all of these kinks for each deal team by the end of month two staffed on projects.

Month 3: you will still make mistakes but should be with far less frequency. Mistakes should be less and less of fudging a number, fudging number formatting, typo, forgetting to spell check to things like "let's add a blue bar to highlight here", "let's tweak this assumption to show x and x growth rate instead". These are not mistakes unless you make them twice - because it's really a preference, not that you got something wrong…unless you were told how to do it and still didn't do it how they liked it.

Month 4: Little to no tolerance for "careless" mistakes - I.e percentages, spellcheck, alignments etc. You should have the balance between being speedy and accurate. In the beginning it's better to be slow and right than fast and add 3 turns for stupid little shit like formatting or wrong capex sign. If someone hasn't asked you your progress on a task then it's not too long at that point. Let someone else tell you you're going to slow before unnecessarily rushing yourself and getting shit wrong because you will naturally get faster over time…but must build good habits.

Month 5: You're a well oiled machine - "mistakes" now come from assumptions you were tasked to come up with bc you're associate trusts you to take a full first crack at the model alone or same thing for being tasked to just build the pages without shells, things of that nature.

Tips: emotionally divest from IB ASAP. You will get snarky replies from seniors sometimes for asking a dumb question or making a mistake, but you can't let it get to you or you will be miserable. Sometimes you’ll get directed to email the most senior deal team member and get burned bc your associate missed something. Whatever. Even if you make the same mistake twice don't internalize it, make a note best as you can and move forward. (As long as you don't do something fucked like send a confidential model to another client or something) Keep an email folder of all the "good" deliverables you have for leverage in your 6/12 month reviews, seniors will forget the small fuck ups along the way….