Tag Archives: Investment Banking

Explain Investment Banking to a Child

Title: Explain Investment Banking to a Child

General Information about Item:

  • Verbal Folklore, Horror Story
  • English
  • Country where Item is from: US

Informant Data:

  • Josh Alexakos is a Dartmouth senior government major from the outskirts of Boston, MA. His father is a banker and his mother, an anesthesiologist. He is involved on campus in the Christian Union, DREAM, club basketball, and his fraternity. After graduation, he is looking to go into finance. He became involved in the corporate recruiting process during his Sophomore Summer when he saw his friends “stressing out” over applying and felt the need to participate as well.

Contextual Data:

  • Cultural Context: Corporate recruiting has a stress-interview component, where candidates are expected to respond to difficult questions under stressful conditions to test how well people stand up to high-pressure environments. How these stressful conditions are created varies from interview to interview.

Item:

  • Josh heard this story from a friend, who was asked in an investment banking interview how he would explain investment banking to a five year old. The friend proceeded to answer the question, and once finished, asked the interviewer how he did with his explanation, only to be told that the response was not effective at all and actually made investment banking harder to understand for the interviewer, never-mind a five year old.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript of Associated File:

  • “I had a friend who was in an investment banking interview how… by the interviewer, how he would explain investment banking to a five year old, which is kind of a rough question to be in. And he explained it in a way, probably about toys, and about merging toys… and afterwards, he asked, ‘does that make sense?’ And the interviewer said ‘no, that makes less sense. I understand investment banking less now.'”

Informant’s Comments:

  • Hearing this story from his friend made Josh more nervous about the interview, because he thought that if he had received a response like that, “I might have just cried, or like run out of the room because that is just not a fun reaction to get.” Thus, the tale made him prepare more for stress interviews afterwards to overcome his nervousness.

Collector’s Comments:

  • Josh’s reaction to hearing this story serves as an illustrative example of how corporate recruiting horror stories function. After initially wincing and laughing along to the story, Josh took the tale as a word of advice and prepared more for such stressful situations in interviews afterwards than he otherwise would have.

Collector’s Name: Aime Joo

Tags/Keywords:

  • Corporate Recruiting Folklore, Verbal Folklore, Horror Stories, Investment Banking