How to break into finance from Stanford
Essentially the title. I'm an incoming freshman looking to pursue a career in Investment Banking and Private Equity in New York City, and I've heard the opportunities for recruiting/placement here are quite poor in comparison to how well Stanford places in fields like tech and medicine. To overcome this, what orgs should I join, what should I major in, what resources can I utilize, where can I contact the alumni network, how and when should I know for certain I want to do finance, what should I focus on (grades vs. clubs vs. interview prep) etc.? Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you all so much! For context I'm non-diversity and I have literally zero experience with finance stuff and also no connections.
-Join school finance clubs
-Network with alumni in the industry
-Find Fall/Spring/Summer finance internships for your resume
-Get IB interview guides for preparation
Sure, Stanford may be known more for tech/entrepreneurship/medicine but having it on your resume puts you in the 99.9999%
Current Stanford undergrad here who's planning to recruit for finance this upcoming year: Stanford placements are fine lol, just join Stanford Finance and the Blyth Fund + network and you'll be golden. We're arguably a bit weaker for traditional IB recruiting than some of our east coast peers since unfortunately—or maybe fortunately—not a lot of Stanford students are going into finance, but we still get really good placements every year. Check where the SF/Blyth board members are going—all really good banks/PE firms. When it comes to placing students directly into PE/HF, though, it really doesn't get any better than here—we're right up there with H/W from what I've heard.
Also, try to interact with the GSB to some extent. I hear they're test-running a few business/finance-related courses for undergrads this upcoming year.
The bottom line here should be that Stanford isn't going to hold you back from successfully recruiting at any bank or firm. If you want a specific internship and you work hard enough for it, odds are you'll be able to get it coming out of Stanford.
Thank you for the insight! If you don't mind sharing, what did you/most of your peers going into finance major in? I'm unsure whether to focus more on CS/math or do econ/MS&E.
CS, Econ, and MS&E seem equally popular among the finance types and also seem to do equally well in recruiting—I do CS, but you should really just major in whatever you find interesting. Pretty sure you could major in English here and break into IB without a ton of difficulty.
Have a pulse
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