So you decided you donot want to waste your time working for a mediocre company passing time all day throwing a tennis ball into a baby-size basket on your desk? You like the awesome pay of the investment bankers on Wall Street? This is the right place to get a handfull of information that you need!

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The first thing you might want to know is what does investment banks do and what banks are out there? There are the Bulge Brackets which are the hallmarks of the investment banking industry that everyone is trying to get in, and there is the large banks and middle sized elite boutiques that also offer fabulous opporutunities that potentially rival the bigger Bulge Brackets espeically if you like their working cultures, and there are the smaller regional investment banks that operate in specific major cities and focus on narrower areas and smaller deals. If you are a college gradate from a non-target school (which are the target schools?) or an MBA with no internship or little relevant work experience, you might want to start work with one of these regional boutiques that get you into the world of investment banks.

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Names and ranks may vary, they all basically do the same thing here. They are salesman! They want deals! No matter what you think or what you were told, if you can't survive the intensely competitive and profit-driven brutal jungle out there, you are not fit for investment banks. Usually there are the Corporate Finance track, the M&A (Mergers and Acquisition) track, the Sales and Trading, and the less glamorous Research track. Let me walk you through here.

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Corporate Finance. People doing corporate finance usually involve themselves in capital raising for corporations, underwriting and serving as corporate financial advisors. Different industry groups exist, so you should expect to work with one of them or work close with them. Some of the largest industry groups are the Oil and Gas, Energy, Pharmaceuticals and Healthcare industry, the Financial industry etc. Undergraduates, graduate students and MBAs are hired typically to cover their turnovers and into their programs. Undergraduates are usually hired for their analyst programs, while MBAs will usually be hired as associates who do more slave jobs than analyst and might be managing a group of analyst. Note that graduate students from other fields such as engineering and mathematics also have a good chance of being hire, especially if you have appropriate backgrounds in finance as well. However, graduate students, albeit higher in degree than undergrads, are usually hired as analysts. From the day you are hired, upon completing a brief training, you will be working an average 80-120 hours per week, gathering data, preparing pitch books and presentations for bankers, and taking care of computer modellings. ​

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Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A). This is the most popular choice of undergraduates when they look for jobs. The work usually involves advising companies that wish to merge with others or acquire businesses. working as middlemen, investment bankers who specialize in this area get to interact with businesses very often. Again, you will most likely work closely with industry groups that focus on the area of business your client primarily operates in. However, M&A bankers generally sleep less hours on busy seasons as they are supposed to be reachable at any moment in time by their clients, so their schedules can be unpredictable. M&A typically hires both undergraduates and MBAs, but less graduate students as you might expect.

 

Sales and Trading (S&T). If you want to become a trader and trade for banks, you better be really good. By that, I mean, you are not getting the job unless you are good at trading. Your titles and education backgrounds or even your family prestige matter much less here. They need the people who can bring the money. For this reason, it is a little bit more difficult and unpredictable for undergraduates and MBAs who have little work experience and demonstrated track record to break in. Jobs typically split into two: institutional sales and trading. You can be trading equity, commodity or fixed income. Traders usually work when the market is on, so your work hours are much less prolonged compared to other investment banker in corporate finance or M&A. However, as the atmosphere is fast paced and sometimes trading opportunities can pass at a snap of fingers, traders may not even have time to talk to each other or eat a decent lunch. Chances of breaking are good if you network and coldcall. Generally there are less people trying to find their way into trading, and senior traders are more wary of who they hire. Good thing is, if you are smart enough and desperately want to be rich, it really doesn't matter where you go to school.

 

Finally, there's the Research. Investment bankers sell securities. The research departments spent hours after hours studying and researching before writing the reports about specific companies and the economy and making recommendations of buying and selling securities on the market. This is a good fit for you if you enjoy reading and dealing with numbers. The research jobs are less glamourous and can be a little bit solitary in nature, so make sure you are choosing the right track.

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Investment Banking