Recruit for banking in MBA 2nd yr or later

Want to get advice from people who know how banking recruitment works.

I am doing my MBA from a top 15 b-school in the US and tried to recruit for banking in my first year. Unfortunately, it didnt work out for me and now I am doing a corporate finance internship looking at budgeting, forecasting etc.

I want to understand my chances of getting into i-banking now, either in the second year or post MBA. I know MBA internship is THE primary channel to get in the door for most BB and given the state of the economy with horrible Q2 results and all, most banks might not even recruit anyone else outside guys who interned with them this summer.

So, my questions are - do i-banks recruit students with Corp. Finance internship experience at all during second year? I have no prior Finance experience whatsoever. What would be a good kinda job (Business Development, treasury etc.) to get in second year so that I can switch to banking in 1-2 yrs after graduating?

Thanks!

10 Comments
 

Is your school a target? Some schools in the top 15 range are actual banking targets (Stern), others are semi-targets (Cornell, Yale, Darden, Ross) and others are non-targets (Berkeley - West Coast only, UCLA). If you're at Stern, Cornell or Yale, you get the networking access to NYC, and I imagine the best thing to do would be to pound the pavement.

The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd.
 

Oh, and in terms of a non-banking job... you can work your way into a bank in a middle office position. I've seen compliance folks at BBs (think Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Citi etc) move over to being on the deal team.

The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd.
 
Best Response

Depends on the school, but it is possible to find a position in the second year. I know that we had a decent number of banks on campus recruiting second years, although there were a handful that had filled all open spaces with people from the summer. We had GS, CS, Greenhill, Jeffries, Lazard, BAML, Blackstone, Nomura, and UBS all interview second year MBAs (note: Blackstone and Greenhill interviewed, but I am not sure if they ended up taking people). Of course, JPM, MS, DB and some others didn't even bother coming to campus. As someone mentioned before, it really depends on if your school is a target for IB. It also depends on if there may be people in your program that they did not interview in the prior year. If you are at a school like Northwestern, Columbia, or NYU, where there may be joint JD/MBAs or alternative accelerated programs, they have a much better reason to come back and interview people that were not available for internships.

 

I know people who did corp dev their first summer and ended up banking with BAML and DB, off the top of my head, and people who did consulting their first summer without finance experience who also landed at BBs. Not easy, but possible at a T15 b-school, semi-target.

Note that recruiting starts much earlier second year. Continue networking over the summer with the bankers you met first year, and know that while there will be fewer spots, there are also fewer people competing the second time around. Banks will try to replace spots allotted to summers who didn't make the cut and those too who shopped their offers and left. Banks try to fill spots before campus recruiting, so they don't have to go through the whole hassle again. Good luck.

 

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