Your answer to “Why investment banking?” should already be clear from your story: you liked Part A of Experience X and Part B of Experience Y and want to combine what you enjoyed and did well at in previous jobs, and that’s what investment banking at this firm/group offers.

If your story is structured properly, they shouldn’t even have to ask this question. You don’t need to state explicitly, “And if you’re wondering why I want to do investment banking…” – just make sure you explain it via your previous internships.

The most important thing here is keeping your story concise because bankers tend to drift off once you go beyond about 2 minutes.

Usually in a situation like this, you want to frame your experience as if you were “testing” different fields, and now you want to do IB to combine the elements of each different field that you like. PE FoF is quite distant from IB work, but you could say that you liked the direct investing and deal work but not so much the fund monitoring, and so IB appeals to you because of all the deal work.

But to say anything more substantial, I would need more information on your story and previous experiences.

You can use almost anything as your “spark”; whether or not it’s a good spark is a different story. An alumni guest speaker series event at your finance club is decent but not the best one I’ve heard because it’s a bit generic (couldn’t any other student attending the event also use this story?). But if you have nothing better, sure, use it.

Thank you so much Brian. I will structure my story as you advised.

I think you need to make it sound like your goal all along was to get into IB, but then made a mistake going into tech for [Insert convincing reasons X and Y], but now you realize that the issue wasn’t so much IB itself but rather the specific bank/group you were at. So you want to continue on in the industry and exit tech, but do so at a larger or more different bank.

Your story is very dependent on explaining the mistaken reasons why you went into tech rather than accepting the IB offer, and I can’t really say more without knowing those reasons or the possible reasons.

Thank you for all the replies on questions.
I worked in the Energy industry – Investment/Strategy roles, then did my MBA. Got into boutique IB bank (Industrials focused) but decided not to full time and went with big tech. It’s been only 4 month and I want to reapply to bulge banks Industrials. I am having a bit of trouble with structuring my story, I want to start my university, where I am now and how I was fitting more to IB, why im here, my boutique internship + pre-MBA relevant experience. However, I feel like it is not chronological and my finance spark seems too recent, as well as this is the bank I applied for summer internships before and went to interviews. I wanted to ask your view how would you structure it best to sound reasonable and to the point. Thank you very much.

Rana

You can still start with your engineering degree and then explain why you wanted to switch to finance and how each internship brought you closer. But you shouldn’t go into too much detail on the first 2 internships because they matter much less than the investment analyst one. I would not skip the engineering part because it will help to explain *why* you switched and did a Master’s in Finance (for your spark).