Investment Banking opportunities at Marshall

How is the IB scene at Marshall? How easy is it to get an internship(paid/unpaid) at a NYC hedge fund? Is USC a semi target school? What should I do at USC to best prepare myself for a career in investment banking?

IB recruitment out of USC is as strong as you’re going to get on the West Coast… which is not saying a great deal. I know you’re getting the concept of target/semi-target schools from certain online resources, but the target/non-target distinction isn’t easily translatable when you’re comparing West Coast schools to East Coast schools. Let’s just say if your sole intent is investment banking, schools like Michigan, UVA, and NYU - which are categorically not as selective as top schools in California - are going to provide a path of lesser resistance than literally any school in California, including Stanford/USC etc.

Now if you were to compare apples to apples, i.e. USC to Cal to Stanford to UCLA, it’s pretty natural to assume Marshall would be in the “target” bracket, even if you were to just look at it on paper. Marshall is a very large business school, and is closest atmospheric-wise to traditional East Coast private schools. If you looked at USC alumni representation at specific BB and MM banks on LinkedIn, and accounted for relative undergraduate class size, USC is the most represented Californian school in high finance. Also note that USC only began to be heavily recruited as a prestigious school maybe 10 years ago, so those figures lag behind reality. The only other school that compares is Claremont McKenna College, which has huge tradition in finance what with the KKR founders having come from there. You won’t see as much competition as you’d think coming out of Palo Alto because those kids are all majoring in CS these days.

So beyond USC Marshall being a wealthy private business school where a bunch of kids with high SAT scores and Type-A personalities self-select into, USC is similar to East Coast targets because it has the only thing that really matters in finance recruiting. USC is known for having the most active and enthusiastic alumni-base in California, and that’s core to a relationship based industry like high finance. I’m sure the resources you’re reading are saying “network is everything” - and that’s entirely true. Alumni loyalty is crucial to BB and MM banks developing recruiting relationships with certain schools and coming back year after year to pick out candidates that are a “known quantity.”

Hoping for your resume to get picked out of a pile of 4.0 Harvard grads is a very, very, ineffective approach at breaking into banking - so unless you’re a 4.0 Harvard grad, everyone seriously committed to entering the industry is trying to boost their chances of getting an interview via networking. A successful outcome of networking is having the analyst(s) that sift through the resume pile remember your name when it comes up, or having your resume put in the “other pile” from the get-go, which involves having someone who’s VP-level or higher vouch for you. Now if you went to some random public school that doesn’t send many kids into finance in the first place, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone to talk to that would have an interest in trying to help you… But you’re coming out of USC, so now all of a sudden, you’re on a level playing field with applicants from East Coast target schools, because chances are, you’ll be able to find a USC alumnus at the bank you’re applying to who would at least give you the time of day to hear your story. Because that’s what Trojans do.

So what I’m saying is, USC Marshall is as much of a target as any other school you’d like to imagine yourself attending, as long as you make it so. The resources are all there. When I was looking at the on campus recruiting positions last fall, I saw front office openings from dozens of investment banks. There are two very active business fraternities here whose actives go all out for investment banking and consulting. And of course there’s the network. The only thing you’d be lacking is location, and that’s something all West Coast schools suffer. The BB’s LA offices are tiny, and SF is only marginally better. Breaking into NYC offices is inconvenient because you’d have to search harder for alumni, and you’d have to fly back on forth if you wanted to have informational interviews or go to recruiting events. MM banks with offices in LA, SF, or Orange County are the sweet spot for USC grads, and that’s where we represent most.

In any case, it definitely won’t be “easy.” I would know because I dropped out of the race. When I changed my major to CSBA, I developed other career interests and my non-finance internship and personal projects forewent me being able to keep my GPA up to the standards set by investment banks. You have to treat recruiting like a job. Business majors make up for their less rigorous course-work by putting in the footwork… as in you will literally have to pound the pavement to meet certain people and go to certain events outside of what’s expected of you to graduate with a degree. This is just as good of an educational experience as any collegiate field of study in my opinion.

I gained all of the above perspectives from once having to choose between attending USC, Berkeley, and UCLA with the original motivation of breaking into investment banking, and I’ve been able to confirm from my time here that it was indisputably the correct choice among the three.

@epicer , I want to thank you for always providing me with informative and non-biased information whenever I needed it. It is really rare for someone to type a multi-paragraph answer to somebody he/she doesn’t even know.
I really want to break into investment banking. I just realized it was the “field” that I could overwork in and not get burned out of. I will take your opinion to heart and hope that one day I can finish the race for both of us.
Many thanks.

Not a problem. Just recycling a lot of data I picked up during my own college decisions period and it would be a waste for it to sit in my head without sharing. Banking is an ambitious road the whole way through, from the point of getting into prestigious colleges, to networking with people who are older and far more accomplished than than you, to keeping a near perfect GPA, to competing in interviews with hundreds of equally determined peers, to making it through your first 2 years as an analyst and so forth.

I have much respect for anyone willingly throwing themselves into this pursuit and are conscious of the above factors, because frankly, I couldn’t hack it myself.

Anytime for a potential fellow Trojan. I hope you’re already feeling the Family (:

@epicer I’m transferring into Marshall as a junior from a CC and am also hoping to do investment banking. Any specific advice you might offer to a transfer?

I actually know quite a few people who transferred from community college into USC and UC Berkeley - the two main ibanking schools in California - with the sole intent of breaking into investment banking. Unfortunately, it’s a really rough road for transfers.

One of the first things you have to overcome is how fast you have to enter the recruiting cycle. 2/3 of analysts get their full time offers through their junior summer internship, so landing an internship in your junior year is the #1 priority in becoming gainfully employed in this specific industry. And companies hold interviews for junior summer internships in the fall of junior year. Which is the very first semester you’re on campus as a transfer. There are several things wrong with this. Firstly, you have to rush into getting adjusted to the new school, dealing with your harder classes, and also work towards getting a job from day 1. Secondly, you don’t have a GPA yet. You have no choice but to include your community college on your resume to have any GPA to show for at all. Which leads into the next barrier.

Investment banking is a prestige obsessed industry, no-one will deny that. Being a transfer will always be held against you. You can try selling the story about how far you’ve come in life from dropping out of high school, into working hard in community college, into finally getting into a great school… and the recruiter you’re talking to will smile and nod but the only thing going through their mind is that you bypassed the selectivity criteria that freshmen had to get filtered through.

Investment banks recruiting only at top private universities is a very pragmatically motivated. Higher ranked universities have a certain standard of academic selectivity, which means they get to narrow down their applicant pool by just choosing to recruit at choice universities. Investment banks get so many applications that they will just apply all these arbitrary filters to arrive at a manageable number of resumes. It’s just dealing with numbers… they know if they go to Stanford they’ll get kids who were undoubtedly in the top 2% of their high school class. And if they pick the top 10% of Stanford resumes, they theoretically get to skim the top 0.2% of the population. If they go to USC, they know most kids were in the top 5% of their high school class. If they select the top 5% of USC resumes, they only have to interview the top 0.25% of the population. That’s how it works in theory. But when they get a resume from a transfer, that doesn’t fit into their simplistic formula and they don’t like dealing with that.

Things like not going to a target school, not having a GPA above a certain threshhold, not having a SAT score above a certain treshhold (being a transfer and not having a good SAT score can’t help), and… being a transfer admit is just another stupid reason for them to filter you out. It’s stupid, but you know, I don’t get to control their perceptions. I’m never even got affected by all this, but it was one reason that I got disenfranchised with the finance industry and started focusing on tech. I thought the recruiting process was lame.

I’ve heard a lot of my buddies at UCLA and UC Berkeley getting flat out asked whether they got into the school as a freshmen or as a transfer. It’s one of the questions they ask to psychologically tilt you, but you bet they’ll also note your answer. I think you’re probably better off as a transfer at USC because transfers aren’t as “forced” into the school as at the UCs. There’s still a lot of transfers at USC, they just don’t make up literally half the Junior and Senior class like at UCLA. Most transfers also entered as sophomores which really starts blurring the lines, because spending 3 years at the school you get your degree from is more significant than spending 2 years.

So I gotta be honest with you, the people I know that initially held ambitions for investment banking - transfer or not - did not have high success rates. Things are just made so much harder for transfer students. They usually ended up doing like F500 Corporate Finance or Commercial Real Estate, but you know, they aren’t unhappy. They’re making nearly as much money as they would have and actually have time to hang out. Including me - I have no regrets that I headed into computer science, but I’m also glad that I educated myself about the other side before converting.
If theres 1 thing you can do to literally multiply your chances, it is to spend an extra semester at USC. Be more relaxed in finding a non banking internship your coming summer and then tackle investment banking recruiting on a more even playing field the following year with a solid GPA from USC to include on your resume and some relevant work experience. If you happen to secure a full-time offer in your second summer at USC, ask to have them move up the opening 6 months, or go travel the world and find inner peace before selling your soul to the finance industry for $140k a year.

The next thing you can(can’t) do is to be a minority. Most people who go for investment banking are white or asian males to begin with, so this applies to barely anyone, but if you’re a minority or a female, a lot of doors open up to you in the way of diversity recruitment programs in addition to automatic preference among recruiters and interviewers. If you’re a minority or a female it would strongly behoove you really take advantage of these opportunities to maximize your chances. Don’t feel bad regardless of whether you’re the side benefiting or not, that’s just how it is. Happens in tech too.

Finally, widen your search. The one thing USC has on any other school in California is alumni support. There are dozens of boutiques and middle market firms in LA and OC that are run by USC alumni that have a strong preference for hiring USC graduates. Berkeley simply does not have that, and I won’t mention UCLA at all because they barely have any presence in finance to begin with, much less have alumni running banks. These USC biased firms won’t be as ruthless as bulge brackets in filtering resumes and your hit rate of getting an interview is much higher, though you probably have to know someone. Besides, if you only apply to 10 places, you won’t get a job, simple as that. Even kids on the East Coast have to apply to 100s, and there are only so many bulge brackets to begin with. After the first 20 big name banks, you gotta start applying to smaller places anyway. There are many advantages to starting your career at these smaller places, and lateraling into a bulge bracket is very easy once you’re in… Mostly because banks are always looking for experienced analysts to replace the original class that they inevitably churn out.

Oh yeah, it would probably strongly benefit you to join a business society or professional fraternity. These are the organizations where you’ll find like minded people, and where you’ll get real help with resume, interview practice etc. that I can’t help you with over the internet.

cont

Yeah, this is all the knowledge I have for you right now. Somewhere along the process of digging up all this information, I really started questioning whether this was the right industry for me. Like you read about how such a small percentage of aspiring bankers actually do end up with an analyst offer, and I look around and I’m like yeah it’s true. My buddies and I used to talk about investment banking and consulting all the time, and we just all ended up doing things that weren’t investment banking or consulting. Most of us never even got to the point where we applied. At USC Marshall, we matriculate maybe 50 banking analysts a year across bulge brackets and smaller firms? A pretty substantial number for a West Coast school, but our business school does have a lot of students.

When I arrived at USC and got into the investment banking mentality I thought I was competing with every last kid in my business classes for these interview seats. Then when I actually talked to people I realized few people even cared for or knew about investment banking outside the specific social organizations I recommended that you look into. The people I talked to wanted to do cool stuff like do financial planning for the NFL or manage music labels or do profitability analysis for Hollywood films. I know people who came here because they wanted to be that one guy who writes speeches for CEOs or be fundraisers for political and nonprofit campaigns. And this was just in my Marshall classes.

I kind of really liked this. USC is just as selective of a school or moreso as all of these “target” finance schools on the East Coast, but people come to USC to actually do things they want to do, rather than what they have been told is the most practical thing to do - make the most money they can and acquire the most prestige.

Coming from a poorer household I thought starting off at a $140k salary would be the greatest benchmark for how far I’ve come in life and how proud I would be able to make my immigrant parents. Like who wouldn’t want to start their working life making the absolute most money they can? That’s the American Dream right? Well… a lot of people it turns out. I mean I guess I can make nearly that much out of school with a CS degree anyway, but I developed different plans… at some point, my priorities shifted, and I think USC opened my mind to considering more factors. Whether you want to do finance or accounting or engineering or film or medicine, there is so much opportunity at this school, like millions of pennies scattered on the ground. But people here don’t bend over to pick up and hoard every penny they come across. They see a certain penny they like in the distance and they will walk towards that one and only pick up that particular penny because they just happen to have a specific preference for it, regardless of whether it’s the shiniest one.

I never did send my first resume to any banks at all with the exception of a quantitative trading position at Morgan Stanley which I obviously never heard back from. Job probably went to some Caltech guy with a 3.9 GPA. Don’t let me dampen your ambitions though, in fact, I hope I’ve furthered them by sharing what I’ve picked up along the process. Give it your best shot, at least you’ll know! And if you ever change your mind, you’re at the right school. Plenty of pennies still left on the ground.

Thanks for all your thoughts @epicer !