Investment Banking Undergraduate Recruiting

Okay, I'm in Seattle and let's talk about how I studied for the technical component of an investment banking summer analyst interview. I started with the technicals and then I did behavioral second. I did have about three to four weeks to prep, so I wasn't in a time crunch and I could really take my time to do it. When it came to the technicals, there's these Wall Street Oasis guides, there's several of them that they have and hopefully you can get access to, which list a bunch of questions and the responses. And I highly recommend starting with those if you don't know where to start. These guides have hundreds of questions in them. You're really going to be asked maybe 10 to 20 questions commonly in an interview. Everything else is a nice to have. So if you are someone on a time crunch, just focus on like the top 20 questions. I started with accounting, then I did valuation, and then I went right to case studies. Some of the common questions for accounting are going to be like, can you tell me about the three financial statements? Especially if you're a sophomore and you're interviewing for sophomore programs, then valuation and it's like, what is a DCF? Can you walk me through the components of a DCF and how does that work? I am very traditional. So what I did to start was that I wrote down every single question in a separate word doc and then in bullet points, I explained it in my own words in the response. Once I did that a few times, I then started saying my responses out loud. And lastly, I mock interviewed with so many people. I cannot tell you how many mock interviews I did in a two week span, both virtually and in person. When it comes to behaviorals, I'll touch on this too in one video. Highly recommend mock and writing out your responses in a framework, whether that's like the STAR method, which is situation, task, action, and results. And then also make sure you have some case studies. Go pick some M&A deals that have happened in the past and know all of the details about it so that you can talk to it in the interview, as well as recent events that pertain to the investment banking industry. I really hope this helps. If you have more questions on investment banking interview prep, do let me know and leave them in the comments.