WSO comments from the week 11/18-11/24

Sandhurst comments on the tricky topic of having family connections in banking--and just how much that could matter in How much can family connections help?

Can isn't the same thing as well. An MD could probably get anyone hired if he actually put his foot down, but it might not be worth the cost in political capital. But there are plenty of other things he can and might very well do. He can definitely take your resume, he probably knows which resume readers might be more sympathetic, he can sit you down for informational (read: practice) interviews with his team, he can casually email interviewers asking "how'd he do?"... you get the point.

Soft power is as good as, if not better than, brute force in this sort of situation, both for him, and for you. Think about it - do you really want to be that kid on the team whom the MD told HR to hire?

Compbanker helps to demystify LBO models in the thread LBO models in your head. This invaluable thread explains that it might not be as hard as you thought:

Once you understand the big picture and can make reasonable assumptions, doing an LBO in your head becomes incredibly easy. Essentially, just estimate cash flow generated over the course of five years (generally EBITDA less debt/interest payments less taxes), use that to calculate debt at exit. Keep that number in your pocket. Calculate Enterprise Value by multiplying EBITDA by exit multiple, subtract out the debt -- this leaves you with equity value. Multiply equity value by your percentage ownership and divide by dollars invested. This will give you your cash-on-cash multiple after five years, at which point you can ballpark the IRR.

This may seem daunting the first few times you go through it. However, after awhile it will become second nature and you'll be able to estimate returns on the fly.

Callthatbond addresses every college student's worst academic nightmare, the plagiarism charge. Check out the thread Professor accused me of plagiarism; best response?

If your school is like mine, you signed an "Honor Code Agreement" -- or something along those lines -- when you matriculated. That agreement walks through the rules for citing sources, and what you've done is almost always explicitly banned.

However, take a look at what I wrote above:

"EDIT: To be helpful, claim that there was no intent. It's typically not an accepted excuse, but you can point to the fact that you did cite the source in your response paper. You can argue that the way you cited it suggests that you were going to continue to draw from it throughout your paper."

The one way out of these hairy situations is that you cited the source in such a way that it is clear that you intended to draw upon it multiple times. You can use the ambiguity of the syllabus and whatnot to reinforce this argument by claiming that you did not want to disrupt the flow of the paper with numerous redundant in-text citations. Instead, you opted to include the source in a footnote, and you thought it was clear that you were referring back to that source.

If you go with this story, you're going to need a damn good reason for why you didn't put a superscript next to every sentence taken from the source.

I hate to see honor code violations go down like this, but this shit happens. Typically profs are lenient when the cheating was intentional, but it looks like you got a hardliner who is going to insist on nailing you.

Don't know what else to say other than sorry.