I would not recommend business school until you’ve tried everything else first, such as networking, moving to a more relevant group (corporate banking, independent valuation firm, Big 4 advisory, etc.), or even a shorter/cheaper Master’s degree.

I read your articles and I was wondering if you could respond and give some advice. I went to a smaller non-target school and majored in Econ because it had a good program and the degree i went with allowed me to take a lot of math. My overall GPA ended up being a 3.0 but I got a finance Minor with a 3.8 finance GPA in all the difficult valuation/capital markets courses. I didn’t spend any summers on internships as a I played a sport and was trying to make something happen(olympics) with that but it hasn’t worked out. I ended up taking a middle office early careers role at a top BB. I definitely feel that I can use the year of this job to prove that I have skills in due diligence and managing risk, I also feel my modeling skills are above a finance major based on how Econ modeling is much more in depth and am able to communicate that in an interview. I am definitely getting my CFA and i wanted to know what you think I should do before business school to maximize my chances of getting into IB.

Yes, you should be able to get into S&T, but it’s typically difficult to switch groups immediately after an internship ends. My advice would be to perform well in the internship, win a return offer, and then network with the S&T group and aim to switch into it once you’ve already been working full-time.

I would not bother with a BB operations offer if you already have a CPA offer, you’ve already graduated, and your long-term goal is IB/PE. The best strategy here is probably to work at the CPA firm for a while (<= 1 year), then move to something like a valuation or transaction services firm, and then use that strategy to get into IB.

Well, let’s see:

1) You were at an asset manager, not a large bank.

2) This article was written in 2010. Presumably, things have changed since then.

3) It sounds like you enjoyed back/middle-office operations and wanted to stay there.

So, it’s not too surprising that you had a different experience.

If you want to do strategy consulting, then you should continue working at the top-tier consulting firm. Moving to operations at a bank would be pointless because top-tier consulting experience has a much higher perceived value for any of these roles.

I see that the article says it’s easier to go into strategy consulting from the operations (but does that mean operations within the consulting or strategic management in a consulting firm)?
I personally want to see myself in consulting after some work experience in banks, then does it not matter whether I go for operations or not?