Why do you want to go into investment banking?

Last summer I interned in the finance team at a family-owned packaging company, and halfway through, the owners decided to sell. I ended up helping pull numbers for the bankers running the sale, and that's what got me interested. I helped put together some of the data they needed. What stayed with me was how the analyst on the deal used it. He made it into something buyers could really understand. I like finance, and I like work that's judged by a real outcome. In this case it was a family getting a fair price for 40 years of work. Since then I've tried to check that I'd like the job itself. I've taken finance courses and talked to people in the industry. So I want to spend the next few years learning how deals actually get done. I know the first two years are mostly models and late nights, and I'm fine with that.

Last summer I interned in the finance team at a family-owned packaging company, and halfway through, the owners decided to sell. I ended up helping pull numbers for the bankers running the sale, and that's what got me interested. My job was small. I rebuilt three years of customer-level revenue so the bankers could show that no single customer was more than 12% of sales. What stayed with me was how the analyst on the deal used it. He turned my spreadsheet into one page that answered the question every buyer was going to ask, and I watched the first-round bids come in above what the owners expected. I like finance, and I like work that's judged by a real outcome. In this case it was a family getting a fair price for 40 years of work. Since then I've tried to check that I'd like the job itself. I took the valuation course a year early, I built a model of a public packaging company on my own and had a second-year analyst tear it apart, and I've talked to eight analysts about the hours. The ones who were happy all said they liked getting good at the craft. That sounds like me. So I want to spend the next few years learning how deals actually get done. I know the first two years are mostly models and late nights, and I'm fine with that. I'd rather learn it from the bottom than watch it from the client's side again.