I keep hearing all about English majors from H/P/S getting BB roles - have you ever interviewed a student from a target school who bombed an interview and gave awful answers? What were some of them?
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One thing is for sure, accounting majors don't get FO BB IB roles, and you can quote me on that
bro there aren't accounting majors at the top privates and Ivies lol
lmao there aren't even finance majors at a lot of Ivies
Dude just took intermediate accounting and is sad at his midterm grade
It was a reference to theaccountingmajor clearly you didn't get it. Especially since OP is version 3.0
+1 MS You're just looking to feel better from other people's failures, especially those perceived as more accomplished than you.
yikes
he didn't even reply to you bro (EDIT: haha nice edit ^ bro)
Dude your comment has more MS than my post lmao
why can't we @ you?
I interviewed this one girl from a target who could walk me through how an increase in depreciation impacted the 3 financial statements, but couldn't tell me what gross profit is.
Sales revenue - COGS
At least you're solid in accounting technicals
Weird flex but okay
This is what kills many candidates - they memorize the depreciation question, then can't deal with any wrinkle because they don't actually know what is going on.
From a semi target but I had had a bad day and had an first round interview with a boutique/LMM bank. First technical the guy asks me - how does $10 in Depr flow through the 3 statements? My mind completely blanked and I stumbled through the question - took me like 5 minutes to do, with the guys help. Never mind that I had answered that question like 10 times before...
I was also one.
That being said, the strong impression I got is that most people don't give a shit what you know. IB is super easy, it's just a grind and requires someone who is willing to work hard and not complain. I think your average social sciences major applying for that shit is less likely to have a chip on their shoulder than a finance major. Besides, in my experience, most English majors write and speak far better than finance majors, which is a skill all it's own.
The number of times I saw people putting f**king smiley faces at the end of an email or some shit... you can learn to build an underwriting model. It's expected, is my guess; most employers have their own ways of doing things and are going to want you to do it their way, so it can be easier to start that effectively from scratch rather than break "bad" habits. It's far more difficult to learn how to communicate appropriately, or to write grammatically correct emails/memos.
there was a kid from wharton at an EB superday i was at. i don't know how well he performed at the interview, but holy shit this kid was a mess. grey suit, no tie. bright blue express shirt. driving loafers. showed up to the superday with his pants unzipped. had no clue what a whisper was in the lobby and kept dragging his chair around on the floor. the secretary looked pretty pissed and i felt second hand embarssment for him.
i'd bet my bottom dollar he didn't get an offer, but i'll always remember him as the dude who was either so prepped he didn't give a shit or he was a super idiot.
reading that made me extremely uncomfortable
While I was briefly in IB (5 months in), I got the opp to interview a kid for an SA role. I asked him a couple extremely simple technical questions (walk me through the financial statements, how does $10 dep exp filter through the statements, etc.). He didn't have a single answer & at the end stated: "My dad told me to work on just the qualitative answers and have a good personality, so I didn't study the technical stuff"
This is a kid at an Ivy League mind you
Would've been shocked if it wasn't the kid wasn't an Ivy leaguer. Could you possibly imagine a blue-collar guy, say a welder, telling his son to "focus on the qualitative stuff and give 'em that winning smile."? That guy would tell his son something silly along the lines of, "I can't tell you what an investment banker does, but if you want to get the job, you need to know be able to tell the interviewer that better than all of the other candidates."
Me (non-target) at AC alongside 3 targets.
In the end, the recruiter says something along the lines of “what do you think about other current positions and have you applied to any?”
One guy says “I probably applied to like 60 places and they all rejected me.” then twitches & laughs nervously.
In my mind I was like RIP
He’s currently at a BB for a spring week
Later on he said he’s a big WSO fan & I hope he doesnt see this
Ivy league universities are a shell of what they once were academically - social justice warrior politics will eat them alive.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/college/2017/04/04/this-teen-wrote-black…
https://nypost.com/2017/05/19/harvard-student-submits-rap-album-as-his-…
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/us/black-commencement-harvard.html
That first link may have actually given me a terminal illness. It's a travesty to see this kind of stuff happening at such great institutions.
Read beyond the first paragraph and see all the shit that kid had accomplished
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