Stop Playing The Same Game
If you want to apply for an internship or graduate role or investment banking, or any industry for that matter, there is now a lot of advice out there, both online and on university campuses. Polish your CV, stay up to date with the news, practise competency questions and so on. These are helpful tips and you should use them because once they’re publicly available they become an unwritten prerequisite.
Other attributes can help your applications. Having good grades, going to a “target” school, having prior work experience etc. These do help as there are only a limited number of people who can have these advantages. But when you think of the game of applying for jobs in investment banking on a macro scale: with millions of applications each year to firms across the city with only a few hundred roles these advantages don’t mean as much as you would think. Therefore, your odds of receiving an offer, on average, are the same as everyone else around 1%, maybe less.
That’s all very uplifting, isn’t it? Does that mean there’s no hope and you should enter an existential spiral questioning what is the point of doing anything? Well, no, not yet at least. That same advice I referred to earlier acknowledges the process is difficult so you should diversify your applications and apply for “less competitive” roles. You can do that but something about that doesn’t sit right with me. If you want to work in investment banking then you should go head-to-head with the best and brightest talent in your peer group. But then the question becomes how do you stand out?
Stop playing the same game as everyone else!
Most people are just going to follow the standard path of crafting their applications, going to the campus events and then hoping they get through each stage of the process. What they’re ultimately doing is playing a numbers game. If you want to materially increase your chance of securing a role then stop playing the same game as everyone else, do something different!
Let’s say you want to work on a trading desk, go to LinkedIn and find the head of every desk you’re interested in working on and message them. Create a trade idea or stock pitch and send it to them. Start a mock trading portfolio and share your ideas and PnL publicly. How many other students are going to do that? If you don’t go to a target school and don’t have all the big banks coming to campus, try blag your way into an event at another school. Sounds a bit precarious but who else is going to go that extra mile. If you're interested in crypto then start "StudentCoin" or something similar, even if it fails there will be no one else with that on their resume. It’s those advantages that you create for yourself that draw attention and makes a difference
You’re trying to can stand out but not in the wrong way, you don’t want to come across as obnoxious or arrogant. Here are a few examples that I remember where I did something different and it worked.
I went to an insight event at Barclays when I was 16 or 17. One portion of the event was meant to help us improve our networking skills. They came up with a game, all the Barclays employees at the event had a stack of play money to give out to students who impressed them and networked well but they weren’t meant to give out the cash just for the sake of it. We were split into teams and whoever received the most cash won a prize. Okay, ready, set, go! Out of the blocks, everyone started working their way through the room trying to impress the bankers so they can get the most cash. I was running on the same hamster wheel till I took a step back and realised what was happening. Everyone’s focus was on winning the prize so they saw the bankers as a stack of cash and didn’t care what they had to say. I realised all these banking guys and girls had been working for 10+ hours a day, they probably won’t enjoy a barrage of questions So I stopped trying to impress people and instead focused on having genuine conversations, which was more beneficial and I scored by points as a byproduct. At the end of the event, I was talking to one MD who gave me the entire wad of cash he had just because he liked talking to me. That meant my team won by a landslide and out prize…? A box of doughnuts, who knew that’s how investment banking bonuses start.
The second was on my spring week programme with.. you guessed it, Barclays (I got the Barclays bug early). On the penultimate day of the programme we had a networking event with some investment bankers, it was in the same room I was in a few years ago. Anyway, I knew how most people were going to play the schmoozing game so all I focused on was having interesting conversations with people. I was talking to an equity trader who I thought I was a cool guy and made sure I followed up with him tlater. The next day was our final day, where we would be interviewing for the summer internship programme. We had a lot of downtime between interviews so all the students were just killing time and talking to each other. I decided to ask the trader who I spoke to the night before if I could spend some time on his desk for a couple of hours before my interview. Surpassingly, he agreed. I didn’t worry that this wasn’t on the “schedule”, I just did it and figured out how to make it work later. This was something that no one else on my spring week programme was able to do just because I decided to go out on a limb and ask for it. As it turns out I ended up doing my first-year internship on that same equity desk.
Both of these aren’t big accomplishments but it’s by doing the things no one else does that I believe I get an edge. The message is simple, don’t play the same game everyone else is playing. It won’t always work and it requires some creativity and courage to do something no one else is doing but it's worth it.
This is advice to me just as much as it is to anyone reading this because I need to do more of it.