Hey all. This site has helped me a lot through college so I thought I would return the favor. I was a SA at a top BB IB (GS/MS/JPM) and unfortunately did not receive a full time offer. I did not really enjoy my summer experience and then went through a pretty intensive consulting case interview preparation process and also interviewed at a couple small PE firms. More than happy to answer any questions about the IB recruiting process, how to mess up as an SA (things I wish I knew), and the transition or overall consulting recruiting process.
Trending Content - Job Search Advice Forum
Career Resources
No problem!
Why I Didn't Get an Offer: Main reason was simply my hard skills (Excel and Powerpoint). Unfortunately, all of my prior internship experience was non-modeling/excel or ppt work (law firms, non-profits, startups). Although most BBs will say they judge everyone from how much they progress over the summer (in order to level the playing field between the kid who was a lifeguard last summer and the kid who interned at a bank since freshman year), I found this not necessarily true, especially when most of the other SAs had previously done one, or multiple BB summer stints
Definitely not a culture fit issue, overall enjoyed the people I worked with and the group I was within.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Honestly, I worked my ass off all summer and would not do much differently. However, beforehand I would ABSOLUTELY brush up on Excel, modeling, and PPT skills. Coming into the summer knowing all helpful excel shortcuts will be hugely advantageous. The other note is that try to be perfect, seriously. If you convince the first 1 or 2 people you work with you don't make any typo mistakes or formatting, your reputation will get around in a good way and will help you get better projects and more interesting work
Why I Didn't Enjoy My summer: I just didnt like the routine work. My group and other SAs were pretty good people. Absolutely worked with a few unbearable people during my time, mainly associates which would constantly suck-up to whichever VP/MD we were working with. That only really annoyed me when an associate blamed a huge modeling error on me when in fact it was him. Didnt really know what to do, didnt want to accuse the associate and also didnt want to get blamed for his shit mistake, so I didnt do anything. I wish I spoke up but hey, hindsight is 20/20 and if I was better I could have caught the mistake prior
Work/Culture/Coworkers: I got into IB because I had really enjoyed my corporate finance classes and really just planned on getting into PE as soon as possible. I (very arrogantly) thought my summer would be filled with client meetings and discussing strategy, or intensive modeling. In reality, most of my summer included mind-numbing tasks (PIBs, book binding/editing, internal presentation ppt documents). There were some cool projects I worked on but the vast majority was just really monotonous stuff which takes hours, no one really cares about.
Sometimes there are interesting M&A deals to work on that are exciting and different on a day-to-day basis. However, most of my experience was much more of a grind and boring to be honest.
Happy to answer any more questions!