UCLA Undergrad for IB Recruiting

I've been seeing a few posts commenting on UCLA's reputation for recruiting into finance jobs, so here's my two cents on the topic:

To begin with, the school doesn't give a shit if you get a job or not. There are really few resources that the school provides to help students place into IB roles (they've a program called Sharpe Fellows where they pick up 20-25 sophomores: more on this later). Now that you're left on your own, you have to utilize online resources and any other club resources that you can get your hands on (that is if you're in a finance club on campus).

Recruiting for clubs on campus:

Recruiting into these clubs is crazy hard, they typically take in about 10 people in fall (mostly freshmen, sophomores) and around 6-8 people in winter (almost all freshmen). Each class has about 6K students, probably 2K majoring in Econ/Stats/Math. Assuming even 10% of people majoring in Econ/Stats/Math apply, you're looking at a best case acceptance rate of 5% (and this number is on the higher side). Keep in mind that you're competing with other UCLA students who have incredible profiles, so the recruiting is really cut throat. Assuming you get to the final stage of this process, everything depends on luck. I'm telling you this because I have been in this position. You might not get picked in because of some absurd reasons: maybe their club has less female members, so they end up deciding to recruit more female members; maybe you're an international student and they don't want to f*** up their placement stats by recruiting too many international students; maybe they don't like your vibe. It is easiest to recruit as a freshman in fall quarter because you've low expectations of you.

Now assuming you're in one of the top three finance organizations on campus (Bruin Asset Management (BAM), Bruin Value Investing (BVI), Bruin Hedge Fund (BHF)), you've got a road set up for you to breeze through. Juniors & Seniors in these clubs will help you get internships at boutique firms in LA (during school year, or summers after freshman and sophomore years).

Case Competitions:

There are two major case competitions hosted by Investment Banks on campus. Houlihan usually has a case related to restructuring that you'd be able to take part in during winter quarter of your freshman and sophomore year. They host this event in association with Bruin Hedge Fund. Houlihan looks through the submission and invites a few teams to their office to present to partners at the firm and have a winner (I'm guessing the winner gets an easy final round interview for internships).

Credit Suisse hosts a case competition with Bruin Asset Management. Their case is usually related to LBOs and like Houlihan's case, freshman and sophomores get to take part in this event during winter quarter. The first round submissions are filtered by Bruin Asset Management. They typically send teams from their club and maybe one team each from Bruin Value Investing & Bruin Hedge Fund. It's very hard to get to the final round unless you're in one of these clubs. My friend's team didn't get through even though my friend's dad (who's an MD at a PE firm) helped them with their model (I'm sure juniors & seniors at Bruin Asset Management have more knowledge on LBO's than an MD at a PE firm lmfao).

Other Programs:

Around winter quarter of your sophomore year, there are a couple of programs: Investment Banking Workshop (managed by Undergraduate Business Society, abbreviated as UBS), Sharp Fellows: Investment Banking Cohort.

The UBS Workshop is managed by seniors who have IB offers and these kids are typically from BAM, BVI & BHF. So once again, if you're in one of these clubs and know your technicals pretty well, you should get into the workshop. That's not a prerequisite of course, but the process is 10x easier if you're in one of these organizations. Getting into this workshop is a really big deal because you get access to private info sessions with firms.

The other program is Sharpe Fellows (hosted by Partnership UCLA) & there is about a 90% overlap between the students here and the ones in the UBS Workshop. It's almost as if students are placed into Sharpe Fellows based on their status in their workshop. I'm guessing you'd get in pretty easily into this program if you're already part of the workshop.

Final Comments:

So yeah, if you're part of one of these organizations & get into the two programs I talked about, you've made it. You will get an offer in IB, but the hard part is getting into one of these organizations. It's crazy that the school just doesn't care about professional development and a few juniors & seniors at UCLA get to decide whether you will be able to recruit into IB as an undergrad at UCLA. If you've interested in finance and have an offer to join UCLA, I'd ask you to reconsider. If you've got an offer from UCLA, I'm pretty sure you could have gotten into schools like UVA, UMich or some other semi-target. You'll get almost no support from the school and will be left on your own to compete with 2K undergrads in your class to fend for yourself. Having the #1 Public University tag will not help you while you're recruiting.