Is MBA really the proven path for IB
long time lurker here, got deferred admission for east coast T15 MBA. Since covid, I have been looking into more than 1000 target MBA bankers on LinkedIn.
Much more likely for an MBA associate to burnout after three years or transfer to another lower-tie bank and continue as an associate. If I saw someone got promoted to VP after three years, I felt so proud of them. However, much more people became VP after 2+2 since their an&aso years.
To be fair, I talked with more people got into banking from undergraduates and they are indeed more committed to banking than most MBA I spoke with. I never doubt top mba can easily put you in and is that really the whole purpose?
I think it comes down to true interest and commitment.
People who get into anything for the wrong reasons, i.e. prestige and money, it becomes easy to feel disillusioned, demotivated and burnt out.
While it can be argued that there are more MBA associates that become VP's in IB because of the mass exodus of analysts to PE, not all MBA associates can become VP so or move up the ranks so yeah, it becomes attractive to lateral to smaller banks/groups or exit to corp dev and be a bigger fish in a smaller pond.
Congrats on admission and best of luck.
If you go for IB MBA recruiting, don't half ass it with casual interest. You're gonna have a lot of competition against motivated classmates.
I knew a guy in my class who thought banking seemed kinda interesting and was sure he had it in the bag (had siblings and cousins in IB/PE/Blackstone) and came up with diddly squat from 21 banks that target our school. Now he's an intern at HP.
Thanks for the comment and very insightful story. One follow up I'd like to ask is do you think banks are more inclined to promote associates if they were analysts due to the modeling knowledge.
You absolutely have to commit to banking and the recruiting process in business school. Try to play it cute in recruiting parallel paths and you'll get snuffed out. I do feel that many freshly minted MBAs head to banking simply to pay down their student loans, which results in increased burnout and decreased retention seeing as they're less intrinsically motivated.
If you’re talking about the promo from Assoc to VP I think modeling knowledge isn’t the main driver for that. Even if an A2A is a modeling savant but can’t be put in front of clients then I think banks would be hesitant to promote them. I think the reason why banks even recruit MBA associates is they’ve demonstrated and teach the “soft skills” during business school that if they are motivated, can be beneficial for the bank at the VP level or higher.
did you get into UVA?
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