Ask any undergraduate student about the “investment banking recruiting timeline,” and you’ll always get the same response: everything starts ridiculously early. Back in ancient times, recruiting took place during your 3rd year of undergraduate, and you interviewed for summer internships several months before they began. But then banks realized that Facebook and Google also pay […]

Can you get into investment banking at the last minute? A long time ago, the answer was “yes” – at least if you had good grades and attended a well-known university. Plenty of students “became interested in finance” when full-time recruiting began, and then made frantic efforts to pass on-campus interviews. Over time, though, that […]

Is a Master’s degree your best chance of getting into the finance industry? It might be – if you pick the right program. Master’s degrees are useful for “Plan B” scenarios where you didn’t get the job offer you wanted the first time around – though you came close – and now you want to […]

What background makes it toughest to break into finance? Engineering? Accounting? The back office? Being a male escort in Tokyo? Each of those careers presents different challenges. But there’s one particular background that bankers do not like: insurance, and specifically insurance sales. If you attend a university where “everyone” does it, though, you could easily […]

In this interview we’ll speak with a reader who landed a full-time bulge bracket investment banking offer with 0 banking internships and a non-target school on his resume. There have been a few interviews with readers from similar backgrounds – but I thought this one was great because he shares unique insights and unusual networking strategies […]

Is this site dedicated to Ivy League graduates with perfect grades? No! Of course not. At least, I hope not. We do get plenty of readers from “elite universities,” but many readers have also broken into the finance industry from unknown schools – often with lower GPAs and less-impressive work experience. Today’s story is in […]