Investment Banking

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DS is interested in a career in investment banking. Wants to apply to uni to do Economics (LSE, UCL and Leeds uni are all on his list). He is studying History, Ecomnomics and Maths at A Level & Further Maths AS.

Any general advice that anyone has plus also about work experience in Year 12 would be helpful. There don't seem to be many opportunities at his age for w/e in Investment Banks but he has been offered a week in the summer in a retail bank.

He could always take the very long route like me, train to be an accountant, go into middle office and finally get the contacts you need for a front office role.

BTW, needmoresleep - is your DS doing his PhD at LSE or elsewhere?

I doubt it's actually unreal Maria, you may be overstating it a little.

I used to be annoyed at how well known my father was in the City when I worked there, but I learned to live with it :) (his obituary referred to him as " one of the few men of the City who were both highly intelligent and completely honest".)

goodbyestranger - I’m not competing with the dead, just the living ;)

I think that's right Needmoresleep, about choice of degree. At Oxford there's a slew of historians, biochemists, you name it, who all veer towards banking with no prior preparation. And plenty succeed (and then may decide against it, but nevertheless are convincing enough to get offers, clearly).

What incredibly poor judgment Maria.

My point stands: I think you may have a rather higher opinion of your connectedness than other people do, who will know at least as many people. It's rather silly to say it's unreal.

You really have no clue, goodbye

To any increasingly concerned parents out there (I'm reading backwards through the thread), networking is emphatically not crucial. Perhaps it helps for underwhelming applicants but for decent ones it is not a thing at all and of no consequence - none.

Well I wouldn't want to flatter myself Maria as you do but I think it's possible that I have a very good clue :)

Shame to see different views make the thread go askew.

A very similar profile to another current thread on HE where the same poster is adamant no one else really knows - only her.

Given the fact that MEng grads get investment and merchant banking jobs, and often don’t give it much thought until about year 3, out of 4, I rather subscribe to the view that not everyone plans for years and that there is room for people with the right transferable skills to be chosen. The positions are not all filled by economics grads and there is room for later decision makers. Some can and do plan but others don’t to the same level. They might still be be very able candidates that the employers don’t want to miss. Very often they have gone to the best universities because they are very able! That tends to be how it works!

Amongst those doing a Cambridge economics degree and M&E at Oxford (not exclusively) there are similar to the type of LSE student that Needmoresleep describes. These are very able students but they have usually accumulated relevant work experience whilst at school and then gone through the normal cycle of spring week /internship (and worry about not getting one). They are IMO too fixated on this career path early on but very driven and hard working and therefore embrace the idea of IB culture.

That of course does n’t mean that they would have had to ‘know and plan’ so far ahead. Nor does it mean that others won’t get a graduate role when they have n’t ticked all those boxes.
What is also evident that quite a few very able students reject this career path after an internship and perhaps they might have not wasted a summe had they found out a bit earlier what the reality of the job is from some work experience earlier on.

My DD got a coveted role with one of the IBs and I can assure you that we had no contacts at all. I’m also not sure what contacts would have done to help given the gruelling process she went through, from online assessment, phone interview, full day of interviews with multiple people, spring week and summer internship. Also only a few of her cohort on the summer internship were offered jobs afterwards, so it is a very tough process.

Oh, and apparently there is lots of cheating on the initial online assessment with humanities students getting maths students to sit it for them. Companies have now got wise to this so they make them resit it when they attend the face to face interviews.

As Jeanne and others have said, contacts would be of no use for getting tthrough the standard application process. I suppose they help in the case of giving an insight into the career.

Just to add that for the first category of students in my previous post it becomes not just about getting a graduate IB role but getting one with those IBs that are perceived as ‘higher status.’

I do agree that some banks have higher status and they are not necessarily huge or household names. Therefore with these even knowing about them might be via contacts!

Bubbles. No one is saying contacts are useful to get a job.

However there is some advantage in having early work experience, and contacts can help. As much to find out whether this is what you want to do with your life. And in the early years, IB certainly takes over your life.

More than one twenty something high flyer who has excelled at school and University has woken up wondering whether they are enjoying the life they have effectively sleptwalked into.

I certainly agree that there's a syndrome of sleepwalking into both the big name investment banks and into Magic Circle firms and that these sleepwalkers are usually are the same Oxbridge graduates who haven't done work experience etc. In my day when work experience wasn't a thing I was surrounded by a significant number of very talented peers who knew they were in the wrong career but quite liked the money for a bit. Many, many jumped ship. One went to Hollywood and wrote a successful film, others went back to an academic life, one got married and had eight kids but overall plenty diverged, having 'stolen' the graduate scheme jobs, often from their better organised peers. It's the lemming effect. History, English, MFL, Biochemistry etc etc students seem to wake up one morning in second year, hear that JP Morgan is offering £14k for a summer incl time in NY, and have some kind of epiphany which they often then seem to repent at leisure a year or two in, but with a decent bank balance and the ability to convert their talents to another path. It's not a bad start so I suppose the only downside is for those students who've been chipping away for years in Uncle Simon's firm every summer and feel somehow robbed.

Goodbyestranger there will also be many many thousands of very able Oxbridge graduates doing a range of subjects who won’t effortlessly ‘steal’ those internships or graduate jobs. It is rather like success in performing arts.

I don’t disagree with the approach of any experience is good experience but I know quite a few students who retrospectively would rather have spent their summers or early post graduate years doing something different.

Yes of course. I didn't intend to imply that there aren't a great many thank you but no thank you responses for lots of students too. But certainly Needmoresleep's sleepwalking phrase rang very true.

I'm not sure the problem is 'stealing' as such. And I assume there is a much more general issue of 3rd year students waking up and realising they need to start applying for jobs, without thinking much about whether this is what they want to do for the rest of their lives.

And yes, a proportion like Stranger, will decide to switch track, though eight children is a bit extreme. The advantage is that in top paying jobs you should have built a bit of a financial cushion that allows you to explore other advenues. Though obviously you have lost a few years of building alternative careers. Sadder, and perhaps less acknowledged, are people, often men, who carry on. They have picked up a wife, mortgage and private school fees and can't afford to switch track. Then worry when they hit mid 40s, that not only might the next recession see them replaced by younger fresher faces, but they wont be able to find a new job that will fund the lifestyle.

The huge salaries sound attractive, but inevitably there is an element of caveat emptor.

The reference to robbing others was pretty light but the fact is that these jobs aren't divvied out according to who has been the most assiduous in completely work experience on a sustained basis and from a relatively young age.

Noted about eight DC Needmoresleep. Ah well, done now.

I certainly think that university summers aren't necessarily well spent filled up with ten week internships, certainly not if a student doesn't get any respite between second and third year and is at a high octane uni. Why should the Magic Circle firms think two to three will suffice but the Masters of the Universe don't?

My understanding was that these internships are used as lengthy recruitment processes, with relatively few graduate openings in some firms left for those that have not done them.

And often strong performance at a spring internship helps land the summer one.

So yes. Being focussed can bring rewards.

But presumably so can eight children.

I get that they're for recruitment but then so are vac schemes at the Magic Circle firms, so I don't quite understand the need for ten weeks. Two weeks at one of the former seems enough to convince the students that it is/ isn't not for them and yet enough time to be judged. Ten seems excessive and it does drain a summer away. I prefer the idea of squaring up to the third year refreshed (I'm thinking esp of those Oxford students where the entire degree rests on performance in the third year, so little time to re-charge or slack. I think very few other unis do this still but so far all of my DC have been judged on their third year and their third year alone).

not (not ins't not!!).