EB interviews

Are you a first year MBA student? If so, I'd advise working closely with second year students and your school's banking club to figure out how to prepare for everything. MBA banking recruiting for summer internships is very structured and your club should have a process in place that should almost guarantee you some kind of banking internship.

If you're a second year student, you're very late for full time recruiting and I'd start networking with your fellow second years who just finished their internships ASAP.

As a couple of quick pointers for first year students:

1. You are off to a very early start with respect to technicals; most first years do the majority of their studying over winter break (interviews take place in early January). Most firms won't try to blow you up on technicals in coffee chats, although I did have it happen once.
2.  As a corollary to point 1, early round MBA recruiting events aren't about accounting questions, but rather fit (who could I see myself working with?); don't make the mistake of missing the easy questions:
   • What's your 30 second pitch? Why Banking/why our firm/why this industry?
   • What's the role of an associate?
   • Do you have any questions for me? (I'd be prepared for coffee chats where a banker shows up and says "what can I tell you about our practice?")
3. Don't give people a reason to cut you. Again, in the early rounds, it's all about not pissing anyone off.
   • Be on time
   • Stay on top of deadlines (would advise building a spreadsheet with all of the major deadlines)
   • Spell check your emails
   • Send your thank you emails
   • Don't email anyone on a weekend or late at night unless it's the same time that they replied to you. (would still advise waiting until the start of the next business day to fire off the email though)
4. With respect to networking, different schools/clubs will have rules about when to reach out to bankers to connect. I'd advise following those rules unless you have a prior relationship with the banker. Banks and second years should be able to help you out here, but different banks have different "touch" levels and may require more contact with members of the team than others. You should be able to get some guidance on whether you should reach out to people directly or if HR / the recruiting rep will put you in touch with someone.
   • Use your discretion here, if you know someone from the bank, of course you should feel free to reach out to them.
   • Also, if you're reaching out to someone, have real questions lined up, so that it's clear to the person that you at least have some interest in what they have to say rather than just scheduling the meeting for a touchpoint. Again, early recruiting is mainly about not pissing anyone off.
5. In my experience, EBs are typically lower "touch" (some groups don't even have mandatory coffee chats). That said, I would still aim to make sure that at every banking event, you try to find one or two people -in the group that you're interested in- that you have a good conversation with (My $.02 is that quality of the conversation is far more important than seniority). That's obviously going to be more difficult during COVID, so I'm not sure I've got any great tips here.
6. This matters a lot less right now, but in my experience at least, EBs have more difficult interview questions . You'll get more advice from your club about this later, but the BIWS 400 are helpful albeit a bit sloppy in my opinion. If you need more to read, you can take a look at the Rosenbaum textbook. Most importantly, you want to be doing lots of mock interviews with second year students.
   • A/D is good to know if you're interested in M&A, but I'd recommend that you be rock solid on accounting (make sure you can do "factory problems" and others like them). 
7. *Edited to add this point* Keep your head up. Banking recruiting is going to suck especially when it's done virtually. People aren't going to know how to interact, and it already sucks to feel like you're on display. I'm sure it's crazy to think about now, but It'll all be over soon enough, and you will most likely have something lined up.  

If you haven't been able to tell already, lean on second years and your banking club who will hold your hand through the entire process. If you follow the process, it's pretty hard to not find something in banking.