Bad resume?

Notepad:

In all honesty, your resume looks fairly generic. As an on-campus recruiter, this is what I would think:

• GPA: good
• Major: Econ/math. Could mean anything from taking the easiest possible classes to really taking an intense route with the math. I wonder if there was any advanced math at all? Probably not, or it would be listed.
• Okay, did some stuff in high school. I wonder what this person was up to in college. No summer research or anything?
• Has some extracurriculars, okay
• Member of investing society? What do they even do?
• Student government... okay, could mean any of a million things, time commitments, etc.. Probably once every couple of weeks, and few actual accomplishments or they would be listed.
• Skills... okay, nothing special

Would I interview you? Maybe. There are too many econ/math majors, particularly at liberal arts schools, who try to game the system and up their GPA without taking any hard classes. Without any research experience with professors, no work experience (outside of two stints from high school), no hard classes listed, and actually nothing really noteworthy listed for any of your college years, I can't really say that there's anything special. The one thing that would prevent me from immediately discarding the resume is that you have a 4.0.

Sorry if this sounds harsh. I don't mean to say that your achievements aren't impressive (well, I honestly can't tell), but they certainly aren't presented in a way that differentiates you from the next econ/math major.

Don't think this is a problem. Beyond the sophomore level, there are no easy math classes. Assuming he has gone through real and complex analysis, linear algebra, and modern algebra, he's gone through the fire. That, and the 4-6 other math electives that majors have to take.

If you managed to pull off a 4.0 at Dartmouth doing this, smarts is not what you are lacking. Do mock interviews with seniors. Reach out for help on the personal skills.

Notepad:

Actually, the reason I am advising listing coursework is that my undergrad was H/Y/P/MIT/Caltech, and you can literally game the system to get an easy math major. Knowing this, I would grill any math major on coursework. If I don't hear real analysis / complex analysis / abstract algebra / measure theory / functional analysis / topology, then the major is heavily discounted in my eyes.

That's why, when I see 4.0 + math, I think "suspicious" rather than "impressive." Listing coursework will make it impressive.

holy shit, i went to one of those, and we surely could not have pulled that off.

still though, i think it would be pretentious to list measure theory on an IBD resume. seriously, we don't go beyond jr high math to do a DCF.

bcbunker1:

are you looking for ibd? or s&t? just wondering because you have pwm and s&t internships

you might want to expand upon your investing society experience

your resume is a little too heavy on the duties....almost like a job description

did you do any networking? a 4.0 from dartmouth is impressive but it isnt like you can avoid putting any effort in to get interviews

im looking or was looking for IBD. what shld i list instead of duties though?

well i said hi to the recruiters and talked with some of the employees, i mean i didnt send them emails or give them my resumes. was more low key

anaismalcolm:

I mean, I'm not a professional, but as a fellow student I wonder, "What did you do summers in college?" as well as "what courses are you taking so I can see just how impressive the 4.0 is?" Plus your verbs are just really boring. As a recruiter I would just think you didn't give a shit about bothering to make your resume nice if I saw this. Even if you did charity work, show you did something and then add personality.

At a top school like Dartmouth, you can definitely find some gut courses to pad your GPA, but taking exclusively gut courses to have a 4.0, especially in Econ or Math, I would think is borderline impossible. At my Ivy, math was one of the hardest majors and very few people actually got degrees in it.

It sounds like here that you really needed to network. In talking to a few IBD analyst friends who did BB/elite boutique resume screening for my school, they would throw out resumes that had ~3.9/4.0 because they assumed you were boring (no joke, that's what they told me) unless you had other extracurriculars that set you apart. Most people with top grades did also have great extracurriculas/work experience, but those that didn't were dinged almost automatically unless someone knew them and could vouch for them. They'd much rather have a 3.7 who was an athlete/campus leader/fraternity/other impressive EC that really distinguished themself somehow than someone who was in the business frat/investing club and didn't do any EC that showed that they would be a fun analyst to work with.

This is obviously not uniformly how banks do recruiting, as I would think some places emphasize this while others don't as much, but just giving my two cents based on what I have heard from friends actually screening resumes.