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tolerabletariff posted:Rumor has it that Aramark is selling off SeamlessWeb to a PE firm. I'm hoping (praying) that this will NOT gently caress with the $25/night I get in return for my soul. Worry not, I can assure you my coworkers will have gathered the torches and pitchforks and assembled a posse to protect your right to nightly compensation via thousands of free, delicious calories if it ever becomes an issue. P.S.: You have the best avatar. I'm a first-year Global Markets (S&T) analyst for the NYC office of a bulge bracket European investment bank, in training-rotation mode until the end of the year. I graduated from CMU this May (BusAdmin w/ Finance track) and did an internship at the same firm last summer. Have any of you gone into trading without the quant background of a financial engineering, computational finance, or general math/stats program? Was it a struggle to master the work? Did you feel disadvantaged relative to those with quant backgrounds? I did internship rotations in both sales and trading; I'm conflicted about what to do full-time. I thought I would end up in sales, since I didn't have the quantitative experience of students coming out of CMU's badass computational finance program and worried about competing with those who have that background. I'm good at math/stats and learn quickly, and I've taken math and finance courses relevant to trading, just not as many as you'd get from a more quantitative major. When I rotated in FX options trading, I LOVED the desk and the product, although getting up to speed was tough. Not impossible, but very challenging relative to being on a rates sales desk in the 1st half of the summer. I absorbed a lot of knowledge and got good reviews from my manager there, but I know other interns who figured things out on their trading desks faster than me because they'd seen it before. Three more rotations to go after training ends, so I'll get a few more shots at figuring it out. There are also a few things I can answer questions about : - The recruiting process, for S&T and internships in particular. I used to run of one my university's finance-oriented student orgs, which worked with a lot with firms on campus recruiting andI've been lucky enough to talk with employees from nearly every bank for which we're a target school about their recruiting processes, what they expect from candidates, and so on. We're no Ivy, but we get a lot of bulge bracket banks and a few buy-side players. - I spent a few years as a TA/instructor for Tepper's professional communications department, so I can talk about resumes/cover letters, interviewing, networking, and things like that. And of course, I have some reasonably successful experience being the interviewee. - How handle S&T internships and get the offer. - Being in the gender-minority on Wall Street. Since this is a thread on SomethingAwful about investment banking I'm not sure how many of my female contemporaries will read this, but it's a worth a shot. I can talk about the day to day experiences of working on a 90% male trading floor, socializing/networking with the male cohort outside of work, the kinds of women's initiatives/clubs you're likely to find on the job, and female-specific recruiting opportunities I encountered. Regarding the latter, I was not a fan of them after a negative experience with one, but they are out there and I'm familiar with some of them. Back at school, a lot of younger female students who knew me via the school finance club expressed concerns about getting into the industry and fitting in on the job, and since my work experience thus far has been very positive, I like to provide a counterpoint to the negative stories out there that might be causing second thoughts. PurePerfection fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Jun 21, 2011 |
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Jun 21, 2011 10:01
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Mr. WTF posted:...man I so wish there were more women in banking. It is an industry that could absolutely use the balance and perspective provided by both genders. Of the 15 years I've been in it (M&A), I've probably seen about 1-5% women at my firm, excluding assistants. It is a serious problem. I think it's closer to 10% at mine, but still a bit dismal. My intern class was 80/20 though, so at least there's a small improvement on the horizon since the full-time offers went to approximately the same ratio of men and women. I really believe that a lot of the problem is rooted outside of the institutions themselves and that female-targeted recruitment programs can't solve everything. When I was interviewing about a year and a half ago, the 80/20 ratio was pretty much in line with the gender ratio of the applicants/interviewees - not a lot of women were even coming out to try for the jobs. That ratio was no better for my upper-level finance classes at university, either - corporate finance and investment analysis were a little more balanced, but my international finance (basically FX derivatives), derivative securities, and computational finance electives were around 90/10. If every student, male and female, from my finance classes had applied to the position I got, the applicant ratio wouldn't even have improved. tolerabletariff posted:I <3 banker chicks. More often than not, they're confident, cute, intelligent, and easygoing. Plus they understand the whole works-90-hour-weeks thing. Not sure why banker guys always poo poo on them. Maybe they see them as a threat? Which is silly, there's exactly one female director and 0 female MDs in my group (which has a fuckton of directors and something like 6 MDs). At my firm, at least, the female employees are younger and newer to the firm than the male employees on average, so I don't necessarily see the lack of female MDs as evidence of discrimination or anything deliberate. Most banks I know about didn't start recruiting females in earnest until maybe 15-20 years ago, and there's a fairly large turnover rate compared to males at banks. Some of that seems to happen as women start families and look for jobs that are less time-consuming and stressful - this probably hits banks harder than other types of firms because of the demanding nature of the work. I know several women in their 30s at my firm who've worked their way up to VP/Director level positions but plan to leave when they have children; the ones I spoke to didn't even intend to drop out of the workforce but wanted a 9-5 job instead. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot that can be done about that in terms of ensuring more women are elevated to MD level. Banks often are flexible about the schedules and work assigned to women returning from maternity leave, especially if they've got some seniority on their desks, but cutting back on time and effort at work doesn't exactly keep you on track for promotions There's a big trade-off for anyone who decides to stay on but scale back the work they do. It's very interesting (sometimes frustrating) to be a "banker chick" (S&T chick?) and see the reactions gotten from NON-banker men in my social circle. This pretty much started right after I got a full-time offer in summer 2010, and even though I'm fresh out of school and still making five figures, the guys I'm friends with or get romantically involved with tend to split into this dichotomy of "I couldn't see myself in a serious relationship with someone who [makes so much more money than me/works so many more hours than me/spends so much time working with single, rich guys/is part of such an evil industry and has no soul]" versus "Wow, I could be your trophy boyfriend/husband! Can you pay for dinner?" Of course these are extremes and the reality is often more subtle, but I've yet to find any guys who are neutral toward my career choice in the way they might be if I had a lower-paid or less-demanding job. None of the banker guys I've worked with seem to poo poo on banker chicks the way you're describing, but that doesn't mean they're totally cool with us. While I do have a large circle of male banker friends who have always been as nice and respectful to me as anyone else, most of them still make comments implying that they'd never date a banker because they wouldn't want to feel threatened or in competition with their girlfriends because they have comparable jobs. Another point often made is that they "don't want to have to talk about banking at home." I'm really not offended by it, because I can see their point. It might be hard to have a long-term relationship when both partners are competitive by nature and fighting for salaries, bonuses and promotions that are very comparable if they aren't coming from the same firm. Not to mention the effect that the long hours, sleep deprivation, and stress might have on a relationship when both people have these problems. That said, I've dated a couple of banker guys short-term, and these issues never came up - the relationships just fizzled out due to lack of compatibility on other levels, and I wouldn't rule out dating other guys from the industry. The Capitulator posted:For what its worth, the couple of traders I semi-know got their quant skills through courses the company paid for. If I remember correctly, the one they did was a 3-day crammer by a local firm. Now, these guys aren't from Goldman or anything but the point is you can actually brush up your quant skills to an acceptable level fairly quickly and 'on the cheap' if you really want tp. Vomik posted:
My intention isn't to go onto a trading desk dominated by PhD quants or that would require a ton of programming. The trading desks I had experience on and liked were ones that weren't extremely quantitative as trading desks go. Most of the pricing was done using standardized models that they would tweak and adjust as needed, and the math competency necessary was mostly conceptual - the ability to quickly understand HOW the pricing process worked, to come up with a means of pricing some exotic derivative a client had requested, and so on, not the ability to write complex code that would do that process for you. We do have two months of upcoming classroom training, though, rather than a 3-day workshop, so I'm sure a lot of this is yet to be covered.
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Jun 23, 2011 23:39
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Thoogsby posted:I think this is part of the reason it will take such a long time for the gender representation to even out. Banks can look at the applicants they get and say they're representing women accordingly and be done with the issue. But how many women didn't pursue those jobs because of the reputation banking has for being un-friendly to women? It seems like a catch-22 where banks need more female applicants for women to be better represented but women won't apply in large numbers until their gender is better represented and they know they aren't ending up in a work environment they won't be happy with. I think this is a big part of it, and I think a lack of confidence in their ability to perform this type of work is another, and that's the part it'll be harder for the banks to solve. Or, at least, that's the reasoning a lot of my finance-track classmates cited for avoiding advanced, math-heavy financial electives in favor of simpler accounting courses that fulfilled the degree requirements. I was surprised by the number of female students who were too "bad at math" to take the types of courses recruiters expected of them, and by the number who, after getting internships, refused to even consider trading desks rather than sales. I can understand some of those concerns - as I posted before, even I have concerns about being experienced enough at math, but I don't doubt my ability to learn it.
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Jun 24, 2011 21:30
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tolerabletariff posted:Fuckin' axman came through yesterday. And will be around for a while. Not exactly comforting to watch 25% of your group get RIFed. Especially my immediate supervisor, who had been amazing for me since I started. Ouch, that sucks. Same thing happened to DCM here, except it was a few months after my internship rotation and I heard about it from some of the surviving group members. Fortunately, my immediate supervisor and the CMU alum I was close with on my desk both survived the layoffs, along with most of the other younger employees. I was on Rates though, and the worst of it happened the neighboring origination desk. On the bright side, drat near everyone left got a promotion and base salary raise.
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Jun 25, 2011 20:51
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