How would you rank the difficulty of getting into different graduate schemes (M&A, S&T, Research, etc)?
How would you rank the following front office graduate schemes in terms of difficulty to get in and popularity among students:
IBD, M&A, Sales and Trading, Research, Quant. Research, Asset Management, Wealth Management, etc.
ST2008, looks like you're in sales and trading. For some reason I had the idea that S&T was more competitive than IB. Thoughts, or am I just wrong?
Let's look at my graduate intake: 100 M&A kids, 50 markets...
Now let's look at a less stupid way as to what is hard to get into and what is not:
Quant research = you usually have some sort of strong engineering background and you actually want to do this job, and enjoy it. Quant trading, prop trading = REALLY strong engineering background, and you are just really f..ing good. Same goes for some structuring desks. Equity research = you have a strong economic background, don't want the stress of S&T, and don't want to waste 2 years of your life in M&A. Sales, VERY different then trading = you like to interact with people, you like faster paced environment. You can come from various environment for that, what matters the most is interpersonal skills. It might be harder to get into some more quantitative products than others depending on your background.
The list can go on and on. But you will see that it is not about the difficulty of getting into a job, but whether you are suitable for it or not. For Asset Management and wealth management, I don't know much.
Now student population wise: some kids want to do S&T some want to do M&A. It depends on your character. A lot of people who actually did internships in M&A realize that not having a life sucks, and a lot of them look for FT in S&T afterwards. Some on the other hands can't stand the environment of S&T (a lot of my friends are like that) and would rather stay at the office until 4am, while I have a beer with my friends when markets are closed.
That was a long post, but since I havent checked this website much I thought it was time for a good post.
Remember, you will always be a salesman, no matter how fancy your title is. - My ex girlfriend
Excuse the grammar. *than and *hand and plenty of other mistakes. The drawbacks of S&T? waking my ass up at 5:40, and going to bed early ;)
Remember, you will always be a salesman, no matter how fancy your title is. - My ex girlfriend
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Thanks for the answers. Does anyone know more about getting into Asset Management and how popular it is compared to the sell side roles?
Making markets is very useful to society in alot of ways. The development of the FX market help companies manage their international cash flow much easier.
There is academic papers out there, about how Energy marketers make the price of Energy cheaper, and allow developing nations to grow by having easier access to Energy.
Then you have bond traders at banks who are making markets for Large Pension funds, which depend on the fund managers to create value so these pensions can be paid out appropriately.
Ibanking is harder because there are a lot of kids applying to Ib jobs more than any other division, including sales&trading.
very credited, though there are usually more positions available in ibd.
I also sense that many more kids look to do IBD for a couple years then leverage that experience to go do something else.
I would think S&T jobs go to those more interested in making such or similar work a career.
In other words kids who don't know what they want to do will lean towards IBD for the experience and resume stamp.
On the other hand, these same kids may look at the IBD lifestyle and turn to S&T.
Ranking by difficulty is dumb. Any job that offers you a large salary out of undergrad will be very competitive.
At my school most kids wanted banking because they felt it to be safer than S&T. They eventually wanted to get into PE or corp fin and felt that banking was the best route to go. In a lot of ways I understand that rational. With banking you do your 2 years go and get your MBA/buyside and advance. S&T was the next most popular and lots of kids I know took more math/stat classes to make themselves more competitive. A good amount wanted ER, but after the SA stints decided that banking or trading was a better rout. A friend of mine that did ER for his SA felt that for a few more hours a week he might as well make more and just do banking. I only knew a few kids going into AM, but it was still competitive. WM was the least popular, but still had a decent draw because of the relatively easy lifestyle. Consulting recruiting was limited, and very few people went that route. I think that consulting would have been more popular, but the recruiting efforts were small at my school.
i disagree that ibanking is harder to get into. there might be more kids applying but there are fewer jobs. you can't really go to a boutique for S&T and the banks need less for S&T than for coverage bankers or cap markets analysts. Within a S&T group, sometime you might only have 2-3 incoming analysts per year, but you would have much more incoming for most of the coverage groups. i think the fact that there are fewer jobs available outweighs the number of people applying.
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