<p>I already posted this in the Ibanking section..but no responses yet.</p>
<p>IBanking seems so popular on the forums, but I was wondering if this is a very hard field to get into. It appears to me that only those graduating from the top tier schools would be able to land an ibanking job, and even that is competitive. Also, I heard it's hard to break the field of ibanking..working so many hours for many years. So I guess what I'm asking is, unless someone is a top tier student, and can endure long hours, they really shouldn't even consider ibanking? I'm just wondering because it seems like so many people are SO set on Ibanking that they don't sound like they have something to fall back on.</p>
<p>Utterly difficult is a good way to put it.</p>
<p>"So I guess what I'm asking is, unless someone is a top tier student, and can endure long hours, they really shouldn't even consider ibanking?"</p>
<p>Pretty much, yeah. I intern for a company that has a top investment bank as one of its line of business. The recruiter bluntly told my group of non-ibanking interns that even though we're in the company, our probability of getting into ibanking is 0%..period. Alot of interns at my company apparently try to leverage their way into ibanking at the end of every summer, and get denied.</p>
<p>If you know you don't have the credentials (top tier school, referral w/ 3.5min, etc.) and you're trying to get into an ibank analyst role at a bulge bracket, my opinion is that it's a waste of time. I've seen the target schools for my company's ibank and its the usual suspects..and I'm sure they reject plenty from their own targets. There are only a limited amount of positions, even less now because of certain circumstances (at least where I work).</p>
<p>Maybe 30 schools qualify to place people into this area. Just pick the 8 Ivies, some of USNW's top finance schools, and a few other places not covered above (like maybe Stanford, Northwestern, Chicago, Duke, Tufts,Williams and Amherst) and you've pretty much covered all of the possible schools that can get you into the I-banking field.</p>
<p>And yes, and you can expect the size of the hires to be falling over the next few years as they consolidate the I-banking field--so the competition for these spots will get tougher.</p>
<p>These schools would then be:</p>
<p>Harvard
Yale
Princeton
Brown
Penn
Columbia
Cornell
Dartmouth
Stanford
Williams
Duke
Amherst
Tufts
NYU (Stern)
Emory (Goizueta)
UC Berkeley (Haas)
USC (Marshall)
Indiana (Kelley)--and only from here if you attend their IB Workshop program
Notre Dame
Texas
North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler)
Boston College (Carroll)
Wake Forest
Michigan (Ross)
Virginia (McIntire or Darden)
Georgetown (McDonough)
Illinois
UCLA (Anderson)
Northwestern (Kellogg)
University of Chicago</p>