Investment Banking

Hello, I am a junior in high school and I want to be an Investment Banker. My end goal is to work in a private equity or hedge fund(not decided). I was wondering what are some good colleges that I can attend. Also what is some advice you have for me.

 

You won't be an investment banker if you can't use the fucking search bar. 

 

Dude... Start caring more about your senior prom. Trust me have fun when you can. 

 

Try to go to the best college within your budget man. But as others have noted, don’t worry too much about it rn. First priority should be shotgunning keystones with the boys in ur parents’ basement and second should be shooting ur shot with every decent looking girl that comes your way. HS memories will last a lifetime.

 
Most Helpful

Since everyone here is more concerned with being your dad than answering your question I'll give it a shot.

1. Get into a target school. This means very high GPA and SAT scores and also having leadership experience either within or outside of school. Target the schools that place investment banking analysts in the city you want to be in (NYC, SF, CHI, HOU). Generally schools in the US News top 25 will be targets. There are many threads on this website about target schools but generally Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, Brown, Stanford, Chicago, Berkeley, Northwestern, and Duke will be at the top of most lists. After these many state schools and other small private schools are targets as well but generally the list above is preferred.

2. Begin to develop a passion for markets. Start learning as much as you can. Read books, invest, look to join or run a student investment club at your high school. Listen to podcasts etc. And when I said read books I mean really read a ton of books on this stuff. Make it your goal to read a book a month or a book a week if you are a real baller. 

3. Once you get into school pick a major that you can get a 3.7+ in. Depending on the school you can pick anything but for IB specifically econ, math, or finance (if the school has an undergraduate business school) will all work. (If you want to do quantitative finance I would recommend math/computer science.)

Bonus tip - learn to work hard as shit. This is often underplayed on this website but generally people in these fields are incredibly incredibly driven, self motivated, and can make themselves work for hours and hours either for $$$ or because they love it. If you find an opportunity to develop that type of work ethic in high school, that experience and skill will be more valuable than any of the steps above. 

After this comes recruiting for analyst spots, your analyst stint, and then PE/HF recruiting. Since all that is so far away just focus on the top 3 steps. Also, a ton of people make it into IB/PE/HF doing only 1 or 0 of these steps but I feel generally these steps will serve you just fine. 

I didn't do IB out of undergrad, I'm just doing my best to compile things I have read on this site into a couple bullet points for you. 

 

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