travails of the Yalie
Yale Daily News - November 1, 2006 http://www.yaledailynews.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=34068
Future I-bankers face grueling interview cycle
By Christina Pryor Staff Reporter
While most students cannot see the invasion, some are certainly
feeling its effects. One student slips into his afternoon seminar
each week and furiously undoes his tie before opening his backpack.
Another senior returns from New York, weighed down by a briefcase and
garment bags from his whirlwind of interviews, while one more dressed
in a suit and heels carries her dry cleaning into her residential
college.
It is fall recruiting season, and many seniors are beginning to think
about the transition from the Elm City’s Wall Street to its more
famous counterpart 80 miles away in New York. The corporate world has
entered the collegiate bubble in the form of recruiters who flock to
Yale to interview students for investment banks and consulting firms.
For many seniors, the flurry of activity is just an additional task
to juggle along with writing theses and attending society meetings.
Alex Yergin ‘07, who is currently interviewing for finance jobs, said
the recruiting process can be extremely stressful.
“The problem isn’t how much time it takes as how disabling it is,” he
said. “It’s disabling in the sense that you’re preparing for
interviews and at the same time when you go to these interviews you
have to make sure you’re sleeping and also spending some time relaxing.”
Exact data is not available on the number of seniors currently going
through the interview process, but business and finance continue to
attract large numbers of graduates. According to a survey by the Yale
Office of Institutional Research, 18 percent of the Class of 2004 was
employed in these fields one year after graduation. This number is up
from 2002, when 13 percent of the graduating class was employed in
finance and consulting, but down from 2000, when 22 percent of the
class entered the fields. James Grant, a senior vice president at
J.P. Morgan, said the number of students employed in finance is often
influenced by market cycles.
Investment banks and consulting firms send senior executives, who are
often Yale alumni, to New Haven at the start of the school year to
make presentations and hold receptions before interviews start. After
the informational meetings, students are able to submit their resumes
and cover letters through the eRecruiting feature on the
Undergraduate Career Services Web site, in addition to filling out
the companies’ specific applications.
At the beginning of October, groups of recruiters known as “school
teams” begin to conduct on-campus interviews at UCS. Interviewers for
investment banks may ask students questions that relate quantitative
ability with common sense, while consulting firms typically require
students to do a one hour case study and come up with a solution to a
problem.
Corey Lomas ‘07 said he thinks the current interview format often
does not allow a recruiter to accurately judge a candidate’s aptitude
for a job.
“What I don’t like about these interviews is that they’re very
impersonal,” he said. “You walk into a room and talk to someone for
30 minutes and they make a decision about you. In my opinion, that’s
certainly not enough time to size up a person and determine whether
or not they’ll be a good fit for a job.”
After first rounds, seniors may be called back for a second round of
all-day interviews at the firm’s main offices, which are taking place
now. The interviews are more extensive, and students may be required
to repeat their answers to the same questions to up to six different
groups. Candidates are notified by phone within a few days if they
have received offers, and students who have applied through UCS then
have two weeks to accept or decline, typically by the end of November.
Students said the recruiting process can take from 5 to 20 hours a
week depending on how many firms someone is interviewing for, and it
is often challenging to balance with academic and extracurricular
obligations.
Elizabeth Debevoise ‘07, who is double majoring in Economics and
International Studies, worked for Lehman Brothers Investment
Management last summer in New York and said she will probably accept
the offer she received at the end of her internship. She said she is
grateful to be done with the process, which she called exhausting,
particularly the demands of traveling back and forth between New
Haven and New York for second rounds.
“It takes over your life,” she said. “The people who are doing this
right now aren’t going to class.”
While some seniors are going through the fall cycle right now, others
already have jobs lined up for next year after interviewing in the
spring and working internships over the summer. The spring interviews
are identical to those held in the fall, but the internship serves as
an extended try-out that is beneficial to banks because they can
track analysts’ performances over a two-month period. Many seniors
will return to the firms where they worked last summer, while others
are going through the process again in hopes of being hired at a
different company.
UCS Director Philip Jones said early in the year, UCS focuses on
industries that have predictable hiring cycles. In fields like
journalism, less hiring takes place, he said, and for other
opportunities such as the Peace Corps, which also hires large numbers
of graduates each year, recruiting tends to occur second semester.
“It’s a question of understanding the cycles of employment and
timing,” he said.
But some students not interested in the financial world said they
feel limited by the offerings at UCS. Although the center offers
programs such as Metrolink, which brings seniors to sites in
Washington, D.C. and New York to interview in fields such as politics
and education, it remains more difficult for those not interested in
business to get assistance.
“I don’t think they have enough resources for students,” Nic Grant
‘06 said. “If you’re looking for something atypical they are not very
helpful.”
Lomas said he thinks students are overly concerned with getting job
offers from big-name banks - like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley -
and do not think enough about what their job will actually be like.
“People get too focused on highly publicized jobs,” he said. “If you
think about it you’re really signing your life away for two years to
be electronically tethered to a Blackberry. I feel like coming out of
Yale there are so many other interesting things to do.”
While many students who participate in the finance and consulting
interview cycle are economics majors like Yergin and Debevoise,
students from other majors and some with no finance background at all
are also going through the process. Students who do not have strong
preparation in the subject said they must do research on their own to
answer recruiters’ questions about what is happening in the markets.
History of Science, History of Medicine major Blair Golden ‘07 went
through the spring interview process last year and said while many of
the investment banks she interviewed with appreciated the value of a
liberal arts education, others seemed more inclined to hire those
with a strong interest in economics.
“Because Yale is a liberal arts school, it’s not as though students
have taken 10 classes in finance or accounting,” she said. “Even the
Yale candidates who were very qualified economics majors still had a
liberal arts bias, so I felt more on par with them than I would have
at another school like UPenn.”
Golden said she received an offer from her internship at Dresdner
Kleinwort in New York, but said she is unsure whether she will pursue
a career in finance. She is currently interviewing for Teach for
America, jobs in the health care industry and research fellowships,
but said there is still a high possibility that she will return to
Dresdner next fall.
James Grant said his company employs many recent college graduates
without a background in economics or finance, but that these new
hires must have an aptitude for numbers.
“We feel they’re going to have a training program and work experience
that teaches them all they need to know in terms of fundamentals and
the analytical side of business,” he said.
The firm looks for students with drive, ability to take on a
leadership role, and something unusual in their extracurriculars or
coursework, James Grant said.
A senior partner at a boutique investment firm who asked not to be
named said his company rarely hires students without financial
experience. The company hires four analysts per year instead of 100
as large banks do, so they must ensure that candidates will succeed
at the company. While large banks such as JP Morgan can afford to
take chances by hiring students who did not major in economics,
smaller firms are less willing to take those risks, he said.
“As much as we love someone who was a history or a political science
major with a 4.0 and great SAT scores, at the end of the day, one of
your jobs is to sit around and make models,” he said. “Someone would
have to have an incredible hook for a boutique to say, ‘Sure, come on
in,’ without linear algebra or calculus or any quantitative background.”