Photo credit: lker ├çeki├º/iStock/Thinkstock, Get the latest career advice and insight from eFinancialCareers straight to your inbox, Please click the verification link in your email to activate your newsletter subscription. It quickly leads to a bizarre status game in which they wind up in a frenzied competition with each other over jobs that they had previously never heard of or thought of as dull and lacking much social purpose. “On the investment banking side, they’re looking for somebody who already has a couple of years under their belt working on similarly sized deals and strong knowledge of the particular investment product or strategy type who doesn’t need a lot of training,” she says. These are among the most difficult jobs for a recent grad to obtain, because the accounts are typically the largest. For many of us, that then spurs a lifetime of trying to fill that hole, sometimes through drugs and alcohol, sometimes through success and achievement. Unless you reinvent yourself (grad school, starting from the beginning in a new position) you will remain in that exact discipline for the rest of your life. It's also arbitrary. Another junior at Harvard laughingly recalled that he “thought careers in finance were like being a bank teller, being an accountant, or something.” Yet despite their utter lack of knowledge of these jobs, all four of these students are currently pursuing or, in the case of the two alums, have already taken their first jobs in finance or consulting firms. "Who hired you? You’ll also cut down on stress. Really. Polk: I think it's a funny and interesting point that you bring up. There are kids who are literally flying down to New York three times a week for three different interviews. Verizon Wireless 5G Home Internet, Video of Walter Wallace Police Shooting Sparks Protests in Philadelphia. That doesn't bode well for the future of the Republican Party. And it’s really stressful. Career services sets deadlines for these résumé drops, collects students’ cover letters and transcripts, and bundles the pieces of information together for delivery to the firms. The heads of major banks kept saying, “We couldn't have seen this coming,” even though it was their job to see this coming. The M&A MD or the bond trading MD? Or something that creates … almost like a progressive taxation system on companies with more resources.”. ", "No grade schooler will ever say they want to be you when they grow up, even your kids. But also this is exactly what keeps the white male patriarchy so strong on Wall Street: If the way you get into Wall Street is not by your intellect or your merit, but how well people like you at a bar, well, then people are going to choose the people they're used to hanging out with in a bar. Operations. Enjoy. You'll probably feel awkward at high school and college reunions. One of the most interesting and frustrating things about those internships is that your job is largely to become beloved by the traders—you don’t have much work that you’re judged on. But being able to boast that you have a team of kids from Harvard is important when you are trying to sell high-cost consulting and financial services of uncertain value. These meetings, which are held on campus in career services facilities, mark the beginning of the headiest phase of competition (and concomitant anxiety) in the whole process. For someone like me who had very limited professional experience, who didn’t really have any baseline for what one could do, it was like, hey, I just see that these are the things that people from Harvard go do. You will covet time. Ads are what helps us bring you premium content! You'll likely be stuck doing the same type of work your entire career. “They will hire you if they like you – chemistry is even more important than if you are a perfect skill match,” Wexler says.