How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads
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Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads
#2The portrait of the college grad painted in the article is consistent with what I’ve seen as an undergrad at Harvard in econ and CS circles.
> [College students want money, structure, and sex appeal.]
But I’ll add another motivation to the laundry list, that draws smart grads to selective/prestigious programs (including Harvard, Goldman, Google, and even YC): Smart grads want to be surrounded by other smart grads, because they want to build peer relationships with future co-founders and business partners.
Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads
#3>The banks care less about their qualifications than their work ethic. Being a Rhodes Scholar doesn't make much of a difference when you're a young banker. More of it is being willing to stay at the office for 120 hours a week.
This is very, very true. In my experience, investment banking is by no means a particularly difficult thing to do, given enough capital to play around with. Quants aside, the concepts that are used (take, for example, "mezzanine capital") are mostly buzzwords used to give a professional air to really very simple processes/ideas. It is a far cry from the serious, dedicated abstract thought demanded by fields such as software engineering/machine learning/data science etc.
However, what large financial institutions need are people who are extremely assiduous to small details, have a work ethic in which 7am-11pm hours creating powerpoints are no big deal (and have good sounding qualifications to impress investors).
Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads
#4Anyone have thoughts on this gem?
> I talked to one guy who's a former Goldman Sachs guy who left to go to the tech industry who said the adage in the tech world now is "be wary when the pretty people show up."
Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads
#5> In previous lives, I've worked as a tennis-camp counselor, a juice bar barista, and a Biblical slave for a bestselling author. (Long story.) I've also written for magazines like GQ, Esquire, ESPN: The Magazine, and SPIN. I live in Berkeley, California.
Interesting the author has no finance experience ever, which makes me question his motives.
Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads
#6>The banks care less about their qualifications than their work ethic. Being a Rhodes Scholar doesn't make much of a difference when you're a young banker. More of it is being willing to stay at the office for 120 hours a week. This is very, very true. In my experience, investment banking is by no means a particularly difficult thing to do, given enough capital to play around with. Quants aside, the concepts that are…
> Quants aside, the concepts that are used (take, for example, "mezzanine capital") are mostly buzzwords used to give a professional air to really very simple processes/ideas.
This is incredibly accurate. Aside from the guys who come out of MIT and Caltech to do quantitative analysis, almost everything on Wall Street is smoke and mirrors hiding what are incredibly simple ideas. Even a lot of the ostensibly esoteric and complex products (that a lot of the Wall Street guys don't understand!) hide a really simple core concept once you peel back the layers of jargon.
Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads
#7>The banks care less about their qualifications than their work ethic. Being a Rhodes Scholar doesn't make much of a difference when you're a young banker. More of it is being willing to stay at the office for 120 hours a week. This is very, very true. In my experience, investment banking is by no means a particularly difficult thing to do, given enough capital to play around with. Quants aside, the concepts that are…
How necessary are the 7am-11pm hours really? Could the banks do just as good of a job if they hired more people who worked 40 hour weeks? (Increased salary costs notwithstanding)
Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads
#8The portrait of the college grad painted in the article is consistent with what I’ve seen as an undergrad at Harvard in econ and CS circles. > [College students want money, structure, and sex appeal.] But I’ll add another motivation to the laundry list, that draws smart grads to selective/prestigious programs (including Harvard, Goldman, Google, and even YC): Smart grads want to be surrounded by other smart grads, be…
Yes most of the graduates from the top 10 universities and probably 100% of the ones who go for IB are not insecure.
The only ones are the 1% for come from poor backgrounds and managed to get a place on merit and who haven't learnt to fake it and are conflicted about changing social class
Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads
#9>The banks care less about their qualifications than their work ethic. Being a Rhodes Scholar doesn't make much of a difference when you're a young banker. More of it is being willing to stay at the office for 120 hours a week. This is very, very true. In my experience, investment banking is by no means a particularly difficult thing to do, given enough capital to play around with. Quants aside, the concepts that are…
How necessary are the 7am-11pm hours really? Could the banks do just as good of a job if they hired more people who worked 40 hour weeks? (Increased salary costs notwithstanding)
"Working insane hours is a sign of commitment, of willingness to sacrifice for the job; the personal destructiveness of the practice isn’t a bug, it’s a feature."
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/three-piece-suit...
Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads
#10> In previous lives, I've worked as a tennis-camp counselor, a juice bar barista, and a Biblical slave for a bestselling author. (Long story.) I've also written for magazines like GQ, Esquire, ESPN: The Magazine, and SPIN. I live in Berkeley, California. Interesting the author has no finance experience ever, which makes me question his motives.
So, he's a journalist? Isn't that what journalists do?