What do 2nd years do after they are done?

You're going to be in school for the next 2-3 years if you plan on taking (and doing well enough to get into med school in) all the pre-med courses.

and you're going to have a pretty miserable life if you base your career decisions on "best that I can get" mentality...

I don't know too many second years, but the handful that I've known are all doing A2A or PE...

B2 you have a great point about the career decision rationale.

I'm curious -- what do you think is the right rationale?

"what I want to do"

if you are really interested in finance, but know that you won't get a BB gig, I would look at small banks over top med schools...

if you're interested in medicine, but know that you can't get into Hopkins, I would look at unknown med schools versus Goldman Sachs...

not really apples-to-apples, but you get my point.

I wouldn't go to med school after not landing in banking simply b/c medicine is in the same prestige cache as banking...

Depends. I know some kids (after 3 years) who went off to b-school or volunteer, people who went into biz development... There were even one or two analysts who went to culinary school.

isn't one of the main appeals of working in finance that after your 2-3 yrs as an analyst, you can do pretty much whatever you want because you've shown that (a) you will work your ass of, and (b) you're reasonably smart? not that becoming a senior guy at my bb isn't appealing to me....

Kids at our office are headed off mostly to PE or corporate development. Maybe 2/10 stick around for 3rd year/promote to associate. The rest either go PE/HF/CorpDev or leave finance altogether it seems.