Canadian Investment Banking Help

First thing I would do is give your brother a call - he's successfully made it through the process and can give you candid insight on how to be successful in the recruitment process. The recruitment timelines are a bit different now compared to when I went through it, but as I understand it, Junior year summer analyst interviews will happen in the Summer/early Fall the previous year (e.g. if you are recruiting for an SA role in the summer of 2022, you'd interview for it sometime between August and October of this year). You'll likely see one of these forums pop up soon: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/canadian-2021-investment-banking…

Working our way backwards from that timing, there are a few avenues to be successful in nabbing that interview, but the two most common ways are through school investment clubs or traditional networking. Typically a lot of the banks will hire from the pool of students who are involved with the Canadian business school investment clubs (look at how many students from Western Investment Club, QUIC, The Student Investment Fund (Waterloo), etc. are working on the street). There is a correlation between students who are selected to participate in these clubs and the probability that they will succeed as an analyst (good grades, work ethic, expression of interest in finance, etc.).

Given that you are already in your second year and I would assume that you would be looking to interview for SA roles shortly, I would go directly to emailing Rotman alumni who are in analyst seats right now. Ask them to jump on the phone and learn a bit more about their background, interests, why they chose banking, why they chose their current bank, etc... Assuming you get a few bites and those calls go well, ping them a few weeks later and ask if they can refer you to other bankers. You can go from having one contact at a bank to like 5 contacts doing this. I would say given that you haven't started networking yet, you're probably behind the 8 ball, but it's never too late to start. In the spirit of expediting your networking efforts, see if your brother can refer you to anyone.

Lastly I would say that you should start prepping for interviews. Tons of information and guides out there so I won't touch on it here, but these interviews are going to happen swiftly and the last thing you want to happen is to put a whole bunch of effort into landing an interview, only to fall flat on your face. Good luck!