Investment Banking Recruiting

For those of you who plan to sell your soul to investment banking post-MBA, here is a synoposis of IB recruiting at CBS. I went through the summer associate IB recruiting process, and was successful and will be interning this summer at one of the BB firms in NYC. The process was not easy, it is definately not a sprint, but a marathoon, and can make your first semester in school somewhat hellish. But, second semester has tons of fun and really relaxing. Plus, most banks give full-time offers to most of their summer kids, unless you really screw up.

happy reading.



In regards to summer IB internship- this is the approximate outline of the events

1. Firms come on campus about 2-3 weeks after school starts to give "firm-wide" presentations- where they give a big dog and pony show about their firm, all the positions they offer ( IB, sales and trading, investment management, and so on)

2. About one month into school, all the banks will come to campus to give more targeted presentations, such as " day in the life of an associate" " leveraged finance" and so on

3. About 6 weeks into the process most students start having informationals with various banks.

4. At the end of November/beginning of december, resume and cover letters are due to the various banks.
5. A list of all the students who make the "closed lists", or 1st round of interviews comes out around 2nd week of December, about 2 weeks after resume drops.

6. All IB interviews are the week before school starts ( during vacation), which is AWESOME. Becuase, some peole interview with up to 15 banks, and it all happens in one week. So, its great to give you time and room to focus on interviews and not worry about anything else. The first round is Mon, Tues, Wed, second rounds Thurs and Friday. offers go out Friday at 5 pm.

I hope this helps clarify about IB recruiting.

In regards to which firms have the strongest presence on campus- some firms def. did more presentations and reached out more to students directly. However, some of this is becuase each bank has their own style of recruiting, some want you to do 10 informationals, while others cap you at 2. So, I wouldn't necc judge the style of a firms recruitment to represent their relationship with a school. However, I will say we did VERY WELL this year in recruiting. We are sending many individuals to Goldman, Lehman, Morgan Stanley, and so on. ( I don't want to say how many, as not everyone has finalized their decisions). Every person I know that wanted a banking job, was able to land a banking job. (Clearly, I don't know the whole school, so this is just my experience)

In addiiton to IB, there are tons of PE, VC, and other opportunities. I have a lot of friends heading down the consulting track, several who have summer internships in brand managment, several in internal corp fin, VC, and so on. The PE/VC opps tend to happen second semester, about half way through.