Although along the same line as many of the GPA questions, I encounter a large amount of questions related to, most commonly, these 3 standardized tests: the SAT, GMAT and LSAT. For those of you that don’t know, the GMAT is the test individuals take when preparing for business school, the LSAT for law school and the SAT, of course, is for undergrads (nothing terribly earth-shattering here, I know). Definitions aside, the most common questions regarding these exams involve their impact on bankers, which scores are high enough and not, and when you should list one, the other, both, all 3, etc.

Let me start off with the LSAT and let me be the first to shout that achieving a 170+ on the LSAT is impressive and well-done without question. Now, let me also be the first to tell you that bankers don’t give a damn. Yes a 170+ is great, but the LSAT, for those of you that forgot what you read a few sentences ago, is for law school, not business school and certainly not undergrad (the 2 places where IB recruits). While the score clearly shows that at the very least you are a good test taker, it also shows that you have an interest in law school, or at least are not certain if you want to go to law school (which also probably would lead them to believe that you don’t know if IB is for you). As a general rule of thumb, I would not include the LSAT in your resume, since it will open up way too many questions without any benefit.

Now let’s move on to the GMAT. With the GMAT, there are two sides to the coin or two situations to consider before we even consider schools. The first situation involves a current business school student (or alum). In this case, the GMAT is perfectly acceptable to put on your resume (provided you’ve got a score good enough to include) and I would definitely advise you to do so.

The second situation is a little stickier in that you have not yet attended business school. In this scenario, you might have taken the GMAT as a backup, with the intention of going next year, or with the intention of going in 3 years. In any case, if that GMAT is on your resume, you will often be asked “well are you planning to go to business school soon” during your interview. Remember, if you are applying for jobs after (or during) your initial post-U grad position, many employers will be looking to bring you on for longer than a year or 2 – therefore, you probably don’t want to outright say that you are gunning for business school, even if you are. You will need to develop an answer that puts their fears to rest (even if valid) if you want to have a good shot at landing the position (check this and this out for more help with nailing the interview. That said, if your SAT score is not that great, and/or if your GMAT score is really pretty strong (and you’ve crafted a good answer to the aforementioned question), then you should really consider including your GMAT on your resume in the education section as it will definitely help you to check off that ever-looming standardized test question (SAT or GMAT), especially if you are a few years out of U grad and with a less than top notch SAT score.

Now that you should be able to figure out when to include your GMAT, you need to know whether you should include it. Although you can get into business school with a wide range of scores, and a 650 is a very respectable score, generally speaking, I would recommend that you only include your score if it is a 700 or better (for investment banking – for other fields, I think a 660-670+ would definitely suffice). Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen strong resumes with a 680 GMAT listed, but as a general rule of thumb, the 700 is that magic check-the-box number, where, if a recruiter sees that, they won’t question it – it’s a really good score, check, and move on. As a side note, if you’ve got a 690 GMAT and a weaker SAT, it might not be a bad idea to include the GMAT score since the 690 is more current and still a very good score.

Next, when listing your GMAT score, don’t break out any additional details outside of your AWA IF, and only if, it is a 5.5 or better (personally I don’t think anything lower than a 6 should be listed, but I’ve seen enough 5.5s to know that it isn’t a terribly big deal). By breaking out details I am referring to your individual verbal and math scores. Listing a 720 is good enough – you do not have to go into your 49 in math, since you will be only calling attention to your verbal score that is a bit weaker – instead, just give me the great combined score and if the interviewer has additional questions, let him/her ask them.

Finally, we come to the ever-popular SAT. Where including the GMAT can result in questions, NOT including the SAT can also bring up questions. For students in business school, outside of U grad for several years, or who have taken the GMAT (outside of U grad, that is) and have a strong GMAT score, not including the SAT is not a big deal – occasionally a recruiter will want to know, but it is so long ago that it isn’t going to be a big deal breaker either way, even if you don’t remember. For undergrads, however, the SAT is often a recruiter’s easiest way to weed out several candidates in one push. While many recruiters won’t care about your SAT, many will and not including will raise a flag of “well how bad did he/she do” even if you did not do badly at all and just forgot to include it. That said, including a score that isn’t great for a recruiter that isn’t really looking might provide him/her an easy way to drop a quick ding. Therefore, knowing whether to include your resume is important.

As a general of thumb, scores less than a combined 2100 (1400 or so for those that took the old exam) do not need to be highlighted/included in your resume. In general, these scores are considered the “start” of the highly competitive scores and at this point and above, it would be silly to not include your score, since it will be seen as a positive or at worst a neutral (rather than no score, which could, on occasion, be seen as an implication of a negative). Scores below this threshold do not need to be included in your resume, although borderline scores (mid 2000s or high 1300s) can be included provided that the weaker aspect is not in your math section. Once you dip into the low 2000s (1300s) and below, you are no longer really helping your candidacy much by including your score and could be hurting it. What I mean by hurting it is not that your score is necessarily bad, but it isn’t great either and by giving it up outside of the interview or when they specifically request it, you are giving away non-beneficial information without providing them with as much beneficial information (interview skills, etc) first. In short, a 2100+ can and should be kept on, and anything lower than the low 2000s can be cut from your resume to keep the focus on your, hopefully, strong GPA.

Stay tuned for my next post on what exactly constitutes relevant coursework and titling your summer analyst and FT banking positions, a fresh product on the way and much more! Comments go below and emails can be sent Here!

Boutique IB/Advisory

Before anyone attacks me for listing IB as my top option when I just got finished bracing everyone for being prepared to not get into IB, I am not talking about BB, or even MM IB, I am talking about smaller and no-name investment banking and advisory shops (typically focusing on deals <$500mm, often less than $250mm). While these shops don’t carry the prestige or hallmark of far more reputable and larger shops, it is still investment banking and regardless of deal size, the work will be the same, and skill set you acquire can be very strong. These boutiques often allow their interns and junior analysts to play larger roles on transactions and delve into a lot of modeling and analysis considering the absence of experiences resources and necessity for every member of the team to be involved. As a result of this, you will often find yourself gaining solid resume-building/enhancing experience particularly with regards to modeling and active transaction involvement. Therefore, while your shop might not be impressive by name alone, the experience that you can gain (if you work for it, of course), can definitely help your resume to be impressive.

Additionally, unlike when you strictly focus on the top shops, you are now targeting a far wider array of employers and giving yourself many new avenues to pursue – the trick is in how you pursue them. Although there are many shops of this caliber out there, unlike the BB, top boutiques and MM shops, most of these firms won’t actively post for interns on college boards, or, for that matter, even actively search for interns in general. Therefore, you will need to do your own homework and actively pursue them. In other words, get online and start hunting down these shops. Go through their websites, find contact information, recent deals, conversation points and points of interest about the shop. Additionally, you will have to be ready to showcase your talents and your skill set – essentially sell yourself with each conversation. Don’t expect it to be easy and be prepared to be told “no” many times before finding a bit of interest. With internships especially, you will need to be persistent as interns are often seen as an extravagance, or, worse, as a burden – considering they often need to teach interns everything and just when they start to be useful, they go back to school and pursue a better shop with their new skill set and experience – show them that you won’t be a burden and that you are ready to hit the ground running and interested in contributing to the team, while learning about the business. Finally, be prepared to take a hit in salary as opposed to the prorated BB SA salaries you all probably know about – remember, it’s just a few months, but the payoff can be huge for the next few years – plus, some money and strong experience is better than no money or relevant experience if you end up finding nothing of quality.

Boutique P/E

So, you weren’t able to find a solid internship opportunity anywhere in IB – where to go now. While many people assume that finding something in P/E would be harder than landing anything in IB, that’s not always the case. You need to explore all of your options and I know of at least a few people that found P/E internships, but couldn’t land IB internships. It’s all about finding the opportunities, and since P/E is often the next step after IB, the skill set you will acquire as a P/E intern will definitely be applicable to IB – so don’t simply jump to back office opportunities just yet.

Consulting and Corporate Development

While IB and P/E go hand-in-hand, there are other opportunities that call on the same skill sets, are very competitive, and will definitely help to enhance your resume ahead of FT IB recruiting. Among these opportunities you will find two very solid avenues in consulting and corporate development. Both of these opportunities are seen as front office roles and are quite competitive in nature. Furthermore, the analytical aspects of the position and attention to detail required definitely stand out as interesting and relevant to investment bankers. With either of these positions, the biggest challenge here will be in convincing IB interviewers (next year, when applying for FT positions) that you are indeed interested in IB and not one of the other two fields (whichever field you land the internship in, that is). Essentially, you will be undoubtedly faced with the “why banking and not consulting/corp development” question during your interview and will be expected to have an answer that highlights your interest in banking without: 1) disparaging the previous position or 2) stating that you pretty much had no other options.

Sales and Trading

On a similar level to Consulting and Corporate Development (as it relates to the level of appeal the position has to bankers) is Sales and Trading. By sales and trading I am not referring to dime-a-dozen prop shops in NYC, but rather S&T internships with BBs and the like – often rotational programs and opportunities to work on S&T desks generally running some simple modeling and working on pitch books. Since S&T requires an analytical skill set, interest in the markets, attention to detail and is highly competitive in terms of earning an opportunity, S&T is often the internship chosen among students who do not land IB internships their junior year, and those who ultimately pursue IB FT the following year. Furthermore, although IB and S&T are quite different, many people often see them as quite similar (for a variety of reasons) and pursue S&T as an intern to test the waters, only to decide that IB is indeed the path for them (or at least that S&T is not the path for them).

The BIG issue here will be in convincing interviewers next year, when applying for FT IB, that you are interested in IB only, or at least much more so than S&T. Since S&T and IB go hand-in-hand (at least in terms of eager and aspiring student BB applications), it is essential that you are prepared to answer not only why IB, but also why not S&T – again, without attacking S&T in the process. If you can do this and do it well, S&T can definitely be a solid internship to keep you on the competitive footing for FT IB recruiting. That said, S&T is also very competitive, so don’t assume that you will be able to walk in an S&T interview and land the job much easier than an IB internship position – in short, always bring your “A” game.

Operations/Mid Office

While mid and back office often get the short end of the stuck and take a fair share of abuse, the opportunities can still be very solid and can definitely offer resume-building experience (especially when the alternative is no experience at all – being a waiter or salesperson at a shopping mall doesn’t count as relevant experience). Depending on whether you are working back office at a BB or at an independent corporation (a F500 company, for example), will determine what kind of experience you get. One of my first internships was a back office role with a F500 company and although I spent a lot of my time doing accounting work, checking budgets, etc, I also spent some time on more interesting projects including a few cannibalization studies and promotional event analyses – not earth-shattering by any means, but definitely looked decent on the resume, gave me an opportunity to work in both excel and powerpoint and was more interesting than most of my other work. In short – don’t assume that a BO position will be completely useless and that you will not learn anything or do anything even remotely interesting. There are definitely worse opportunities to take on than an operations/control position for a summer. Any internship is what you make of it, and just as with any other opportunity, work towards taking on as much responsibility and interesting projects as you can and try to meet as many people as possible – especially if working in a BB.

The one caveat, just as with S&T and consulting, is that you will need to prove that you are interested in operations (or at least fake it well). Although back office isn’t as competitive as front office, back office as a whole is known to have a bit of a chip on their shoulder when it comes to very talented young individuals who do have exposure to IB and S&T opportunities. They know that they are often the back-up and don’t like it. So while you might know that IB is for you, you definitely don’t want the interviewers to get that same impression. Learn about the position and sell your interest in it – again, an operations internship is definitely better than nothing.

Stay tuned for future posts on not breaking into IB, what an analyst really does and more! As always, comments go below and questions can be sent Here!

Make the most out of a resume

Without a strong support network and a lot of closer friends on the inside, without a well-designed and well-articulated resume, you will have a very difficult time getting to the second stage of the process, the interviews, where, yes, the importance of the resume will diminish. As a SA candidate you are not expected to have a wealth of internship experience, nor are you expected to have banking experience – if you do, you will clearly stand above the rest and have an initial advantage over the competition (I say initial since, as I mentioned before, the resume diminishes in importance once you begin the interview process – here your experience will still absolutely help, but you’ll need the interview skills as well to keep your edge).

If you happen to have some highly relevant experience, if not actual banking experience, then the job of putting together your resume becomes more a matter of expressing your internship responsibilities well, highlighting select other aspects of your candidacy (such as involvement in a club or two) and making sure there are no obvious/grammatical errors throughout. This is not a problem that most SA candidates face – most SA candidates face the opposite problem – not having the clearly relevant or actual banking internship experience and need to overcome that issue.

As I mentioned before, you don’t need to have clearly relevant experience to get into a SA program – it helps, but you can do it without it as well. With some work experience, your best bet will be to first and foremost sell your school’s brand, your GPA, relevant coursework – essentially some relevant and impressive factors from your educational background. From there, you will want to craft your limited work experience bullet points to be as relevant to banking as you can – working in operations/accounting can sound relevant if you focus on some analysis and even number crunching, even non-profit work or tutoring can sound relevant. If you have little-to-no work experience (and for those with some work experience after they’ve highlighted said work experience) after highlighting your school, GPA, coursework and so forth, you will absolutely need to sell your undergraduate club/organization involvement as both interesting and relevant to recruiters. Holding officer positions in clubs and having a visible impact on the organization can be a selling point as strong as most work experience, especially when it comes to SA recruiting. The key with selling club involvement on your resume is in selling the relevance of your work as it pertains to banking, while demonstrating how you’ve stepped up as a leader, whether of the club, a sub committee or just of the tasks your office is responsible for. Leadership, coupled with a relevant experience base is definitely going to impress recruiters, especially when lacking directly relevant work experience.

Working the interview

Everything is looking up and after all of the networking, resume editing, applying and hoping (if you’ve done any of this), you’ve made it – you’ve received the first round interview invitation. Walking into that first round interview is a welcome sight for many since the interview is now the focal point of the application (not the resume, background, etc – although they all still matter) and fate, in a matter of speaking, is once again in your hands – for a little while. Once you get past the excitement of getting the interview call/email, it’s time to start your preparation. While the SA and FT interviews are similar, especially for those SA candidates that have past internship experience or are finance/accounting majors, there are still some differences that need to be touched on.

Exceptions aside, the SA interview will often rely heavily on fit given the lack of a technical background in the applicant pool – meaning a lack of strong internship experience (that requires a comparable skill set to IB, if not IB) and/or a lack of technical coursework in Finance and Accounting. For many candidates, this internship would be their first “real” finance/technical internship – they may have had club involvement or other unrelated internships, but nothing of this caliber – not the worst internship to lead off with – that’s for sure.

SA candidates need to be prepared for all of the behavioral questions (check out my interview guide for more on the types of the questions and, of course, explanations) from background to goals, from strengths to failures and everything in between. Although the manner in which you respond to these questions will generally be similar to FT applicants, SA candidates need to be especially prepared for them since interviewers are going to rely heavily on these responses when assessing your candidacy.

One fit question in particular that a SA candidate should pay attention to is the goals question – whether phrased in the form of intermediate (3-5 year) goals, next step (post SA goals), or something else entirely. For FT candidates this question is usually not as dangerous since FT analysts need only to express an interest in IB and can then have various longer/intermediate-term goals – whether move to a boutique, buy side, etc. FT associate candidates on the other hand need to show an interest in growing with the firm (or at least they should since the associate position is essentially used to shape the next VPs). SA candidates need to think of the goals question more as associates do than analysts. Specifically, going for a SA position, you should know that next year you plan to accept a FT position with the bank and in the next few years you will be working towards completing the FT analyst program. Remember, the SA program is a grooming and interview tool used by banks to gauge who they want to become a part of their next incoming FT analyst class and if that’s not what you at least say you want, you’ll definitely be in a bit of trouble – no bank wants to hear that you are going to use them for their SA program to land at a better bank – or that you are only accepting this SA position because the better bank you applied to dinged you.

Getting beyond the fit questions, some applicants will be faced with technical questions. Some candidates will be faced with the highest level questions such as “what are the 3 financial statements,” while others will be asked more complex questions on transaction impact on the statements, discounted cash flow, and so on – depending, of course, on your level of aptitude in these fields. Additionally, due to a common gap in technical knowledge, brain teasers can often become a headline of the SA interview (especially for more quant-inclined candidates such as math, stat, econ, etc majors). Brain teasers come in 2 main types – those questions that have a specific answer (degrees between the two hands on a clock at time X) and those questions that do not have a definitive answer (bowling bowls in a large building). In either case, the more important aspect of your response is in how you arrive at your answer, not the answer itself. In other words, candidates need to be comfortable enough to walk the interview through their thought process even if they arrive at the wrong answer – showing an articulate and lucid thought process will carry much more weight than just sitting quietly, or with your head buried in a piece of paper and delivering an answer (whether correct or incorrect). It’s fine to take a few moments and think, or write down some steps, but just remember to keep the interviewer engaged and aware of your thought process and the way in which you are working out your problem – these questions are to test how you think and solve problems (as well as your confidence and ability to communicate) – use these questions to sell your candidacy, not shoot it in the foot.

Forward-Looking Thoughts

Well thank heavens! You earned the interviews, nailed them and managed to land yourself a SA position – congratulations! Instead of being excited, however, you’re wondering if you should hold out for another opportunity and look for something better (such as a better name brand bank or if you are hired into 1 group but wanted another) – maybe push a few other contacts, keep networking, prep for a few more interviews, etc. The answer is: unless you are really close to landing another position and will find out before this deadline passes, absolutely not!

If you have to “settle” for your second or third choice of bank for IB, that’s not a problem at all. Remember, the SA program is nothing more than an opportunity to build experience/your resume for a few months and then earn a FT offer and/or leverage that experience into an offer with a better bank. Utilize your expanded list of contacts for the FT employment search in a few months with a much stronger resume. Additionally, you might find that you really like the bank you interned with over the summer and want to stay – in this case, if you’ve earned the FT return offer, you can relax during your senior year and not go through all of the stress of recruiting, interviewing, planning and praying all over again. Finally, keep in mind that landing a SA position with this bank, does not mean you will have the same fortune with a better bank, or even a lower-ranked bank – this bank liked you, you might not interview as well, a different reviewer might not like your resume as well, etc – you never know – for a 3-month program, take the experience and then worry about your next move – you do not want to end up accepting an offer with a lesser company, let alone in a lesser or even unrelated group because you held out for a better IB SA internship – IB SA is better than Operations SA (and most things in between) when it comes to FT IB recruiting.

On a similar note, if you have to “settle” for a group outside of your main group(s) of interest, that is alright as well. Again, it is only a summer position, and at the end of the program, if you are offered FT employment, you can then discuss other group opportunities. Throughout your SA internship, you will also want to network with as many bankers as you can in your favorite groups – this will certainly give you an upper hand when it comes time to request the move for FT. Connect with the bankers in your favorite groups, find out about FT opportunities, etc – they will be your best allies when it comes to your pitch to make the move. Remember, it is much easier to change groups once you are in, have a capable reputation and have networked with some of the group, than if you are applying blind, with no connections from another bank, school, etc.

Stay tuned for future posts, products and much more! If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, drop them below or send me an email HERE!