Ep. 53 - An Expert's Honest Guide to Breaking into High Finance

Kind of what are the main buckets of internships or full time positions that they usually end up with?

We certainly, I would say we have a lot of students that pursue corporate finance and they're looking for opportunities within financial leadership development programs, which I think is a great route.

I also work with a lot of students that are interested in investment banking.

I would say fewer students are interested in sales and trading or equity research, but that can fluctuate.

I should say sell side equity research that can fluctuate by the year.

And I also have a lot of students that are really interested in asset management, particularly, I think, because we have an investment group on campus that manages a portion of the university's endowment.

So that really generates a lot of interest in asset management.

And I would say the other big bucket of students that I see, they're interested in either financial planning or wealth management.

And we have a wonderful program on campus, a concentration within the finance major that's within personal financial planning.

So I see a lot of students interested in going down that CFP path.

All right.

Well, in our kind of investment banking and financing world, that's the whole fairway right there.

So that's great.

Fantastic.

Well, we do want to jump into it here with respect to, you mentioned recruiting timelines, right? And recruiting timelines are one of those things that every time you ask someone who did it 10 years ago, they tell you a totally different story of, you know, of what the timing was.

And that was true 10 years ago as well, because 10 years before that, it was very, very different.

And 10 years before that, it was very different.

So this is something that sees movement, maybe not necessarily on an annual basis, but we definitely see movement at this time scale of three to five years and definitely 10 years.

So it's something to keep track of.

So I guess, what are some of the main themes you've seen in terms of timelines changing or other timeline related trends through the recruiting process? And if you can't talk to all, you mentioned five different recruiting areas, but I would just start with investment banking or anything sort of common to all areas or most areas.

Absolutely.

No, that's perfect.

I mean, I think it's since I've been at Bentley now for 12 years.

I've seen those shifts that you mentioned, right? When I first started, I feel like the student could walk into my office towards the end of the summer leading into their junior year or even early junior fall, and they could say, Mary Ellen, I'm really interested in investment banking.

And I could give them a roadmap for how they could still land an internship for that junior summer.