Introduction - Summer at Lehman

Hi guys,

I honestly never thought I'd find myself here, but anyway some background. Graduated in '09 (BA in Communications) and thought I couldn't handle Wall Street.

Spending a summer (2007) at Lehman taught me that, along with some much needed humility. Coming from a small, non-target private school kind of makes you stand out. In addition, being younger than almost everyone in my analyst class (Sophomore) and placing into a group (well, 2 people) that had been working together for less than a year all conspired to make it extremely difficult. It felt like a baptism by fire, there was simply too much to do and I wasn't nearly mature enough or ready to handle it. It took almost up until midsummer reviews before I felt comfortable responding to any of the feedback I was getting.

Needless to say, I wasn't really thinking about IB the next summer, having come off of a great experience working for a small web development shop, I thought I was all set. When I left towards the end of August, they asked about my plans for the next year, but seeing as I still had one year to go, we didn't set anything in stone.

I should have sensed something was happening when Bear went down; At that point, I reached out to one of the people in HR who I met the previous summer and the response was, "They've gone in a different direction." In other words the team was essentially disbanded, given a new VP, and was still trying to catch up to where they should have been. The IT intern class that year went from 100+ down to roughly 20, so the writing was on the wall at that point.

To make a long story short, it became clear to me in early 2010 that the web dev stuff simply wasn't going to work out (at least not right away). I started working towards my MA that spring and finished this past February.

As my grad degree is corporate communication, I'm probably looking at similar positions before. I did have a few interviews with JPM a while back, but unfortunately that didn't turn out; best guess is that I missed on some interview Q's and lowballed on salary (At least too low for them to consider).

If anyone has advice on coming from a non-target into IB/AM, I'd love to hear it.