Summer Analyst

I did not enter the interview process in a typical way. I was a sophomore at the time and, in late November, leveraged a contact I had at the bank to get my resume to HR and a few of the senior bankers in his group. My first interview was in early January and was mainly a one-on-one heavily focused on fit questions with a senior banker at a regional office. He was extremely personable and very willing to take the time to get to know me. I had gone in a little nervous, thinking as a senior banker, he would be quick to try and grill me but overall the interview went smoothly and was more of a conversation than a traditional interview. To prepare I had read the Vault and IBI interview prep guides and did a number of mock interviews at my school's career center. I was contacted back within a few days and was scheduled by HR to fly to New York 2 weeks later for a superday. In these two weeks, I mainly focused on mock interviews and tried to make sure I had strong confidence when answering questions. At the superday, my first interview consisted of a VP taking me to the cafeteria on a lower floor to grab a coffee and after some general "tell me about your resume" type questions, he got off on a tangent about the knicks. I am not that big into basketball but luckily I had read about the game from the previous night in that morning's Journal so I had some decent talking points to carry the conversation. After about an hour and a half, the VP took me back upstairs to talk to an associate and analyst team in a conference room where they grilled me on basic technicals such as "walk me through a dcf" or "how does depreciation expense flow through the 3 statements" and tried to dig more deeply into some of the experiences listed on my resume. Although they were in a team, they did not try to intimidate me or use this to ask difficult question. This interview lasted probably another hour and a half and ended with a roughly 20 minute conversation about what I like to do in my free time and my extracurricular interests. When I left the interview I walked through the bullpen and noticed that the other people in the group seemed extremely congenial to one another. Al in all, I would say that the culture that the interviewers exuded was more laid back and focused on fit/how well you could "hang with the team." That being said, I only interviewed with one particular coverage group which has a reputation for being more of a lifestyle group. After the interviews, I was contacted ~2 days later by the VP who had interviewed me on the superday and was given a summer analyst offer.