How to make your 4th Year in a Finance Undergrad Count

So you've spent 3 years in your BComm and you've just started to get into the exciting stuff. You've cruised through your foundation accounting courses, and finally gotten through the marketing, ops man, and info tech courses that round out your BComm requirements. Now you get to finally get to the meat, advanced investments classes, fixed income, derivatives. Having just graduated, here's what I think makes the most powerful 4th year BComm if you want to move into a i-banking role, or back office investment role.

Lets start at the end of your 3rd year. Hopefully you've been very involved with finance and investment clubs so far, and have taken - and aced - every quant pre-req you could get your hands on. Also (unlike myself) hopefully you have interned at a firm and made a connection that will push your resume forward come September when Analyst recruiting starts. Either way at the end of your third year you need to strongly settle on your goals. What job do you actually want? Can you get it with a BCom education? Do you have a connection that will vouch for you come September - don't be fooled by those online applications, if you're shooting high enough they are merely a facade; all the hiring happens through personal recommendations. So line up your contacts, grab that internship and work your but off.

Even if you think you can get this job with an undergrad I'd hedge your bets. Take kaplans GMAT prep course in the evenings after-work during the summer and plan to write that ungodly demoralizing test sometime in September. Obviously if you've decided you want to be hard-core quant back office you're going to need a masters in financial engineering or financial economics and so you should be looking at either the GMAT or the GRE.

Come August start making your push for that September Analyst hire (they hire in September for a July start the following year). Reach out to your network and try applying to 5-10 of the top firms that hold your job of choice. Enroll in the CFA level one for a June test date and put it on your resume. If you've got the connections and/or the grades you'll get picked up, if not you're preparing for the +1 lap.

So assuming things didn't pan out, pour your heart into GMAT prep and try to grab a 700+ score. Then apply to an MSc program that will give you that added push (see previous post). Don't forget the extracurricular's; for me my GMAT was nothing to brag about but experience I had outside of class opened doors to the right MSc program. Finance specific stuff is a plus, especially research based. Get on a project with a prof, or your schools pension fund, and make it as quant heavy as possible. You want to be talking about modeling in your interview, not how you proof read some technical writing. Case competitions are good to hone public speaking, and they are usually a welcome break from the grind as they often involve travel.

If you can, line yourself up for 4th year Economics courses in modeling - Econometrics classes. These classes are often qualifying courses for Masters degrees in Economics and they are tough but extremely valuable. There is really only a couple of 'good' times to learn about heteroskedasticity, autocorrolation, GARSH models, unit roots parameters, and ridge regressions, and the leisurely pace of an undergrad class is one of them. Obviously knock yourself out with every finance course offered, and if you can stomach it, take intermediate accounting as well.

As the year trickles on apply for the November cycle of grad school apps and start plugging time into the CFA level 1. It will generally parallel your 4th year classes nicely but it takes a lot of time and to fail would unravel an important part of your whole brand package.

Looking like your hot shit to a firm is really all about momentum. Because many students - especially from mid teir schools - don't land in the September of their 4th year it's really easy to lose momentum when you know you're going to have a whole year between undergrad education and your eventual hire. If you can pack that time with as much finance as possible you'll A) commit mild social suicide amongst your non finance friends and B) look really hungry for a job, the hungrier the better in an employers eyes generally.

Canada's Best Bachelor Business Degree

I wish somebody sat me down at the beginning of grade 12 and shouted at me for half an hour straight. I wish they had scared me shitless, telling me that this was the time to make it or break it. They should have told me my life depended on getting 90's if I wanted to get into a good school, and that my parents were wrong - getting into a good undergrad DOES matter.

In business a good business school matters, and it matters a lot if you want to get into high finance. My parents had this notion that any education was a good education if you went to a big Canadian school. After coming down to the states and working through a masters in a top tranche b-school I would half agree with them. Carleton (my undergrad) was a good education, but there was no brand, and brand is what you need to make it in Finance.

I just placed in a bulge bracket i-bank and in my final round a "stack story" I had heard on many an occasion in my undergrad rang true. The story is that undergrads from all over the country apply to the top firms. The big Canadian banks, and the international banks that operate in Canada; RBC, TD, BMO, Goldman, Macquarie - you name it. These banks, inundated with thousands of resumes and online applications create stacks. The first stack is from personal recommendations - candidates who have family / friends/ or networked hard enough to get a personal in-firm recommendation. The next stack is Ivy or Richard Ivy School of Business, the case based competitive and generally most stuck up b-school in Canada (yes I'm bitter retrospectively). The next stack varies by the firm, it's usually McGill, but sometimes Queens or UofT makes stack 3. Then it's stack 4, the "other" stack. Here promising grads from mid line schools like Carleton, U of O, Concordia, Acadia, U of A, ect, end up in a mountain of resumes. The firm will hire more than 50% from the personal recommendation pile and 40% from the 2nd stack - their preferred recruiting campus. The third stack gets a body in there once in a while and the other stack is left to recycling.

The only hope a mid pack school grad has of getting into a top job is to network into the first stack. Is this the fact for everyone? Maybe not, but I have yet to hear of a single hire story from one of my Carleton friends who did not upgrade post grad or grab a golden handshake from a family friend. This rings true in my bulge bracket final round interview. We all met before the interview started (another story altogether) and I had to smile as the stack story played out in front of me. There was a Queens MBA with lots of family in the city and an engineering background - likely a golden handshake story. Then there was two undergrads from Ivy, one doing a 5th year lap to grab a double degree Bcomm and Economics. The firm already had Ivy grads in it, and the two students gave a shout out to an Analyst on their way in, definitely golden handshake stories. I was leveraging an expected US degree and a family friend connect to get into the door and I had to wonder, could I have pushed in beginning of 4th year while still at Carleton. I doubt it. I needed to move up in the ranks before the golden gates would open.

The irony is that Carleton did a good job educating me. When half the student body doesn't give a shit and another 30% set their sights on small business book keeping there is a lot of opportunity to push to the top of the class and the top of your extracurricular's. After some sage advice I had weaseled my deep into the Economics department and had strapped some Econometrics courses to my finance tool belt. Most of my interview was filled with experiences I had on case comps, investment funds, research projects, and metrics classes. But here I am 1.5 quarters through a Masters in Finance, that more than anything else, is putting the right banner on my resume.

So. Canadian high school students looking to break into private equity, investment banking, sales and trading, or back office, need to shoot for the top schools. Ivy, McGill are good bets and the rest is up to research. Call the school and ask what banks recruit there. More than almost every other university degree a Bcomm Finance is a trade school degree - you are learning the skills you will use on the job. This means the University isn't the eye opening liberating experience it is for art students; for finance students university is the factory that will mold you into the model producing, sensitivity measuring, NPV pumping, quant jock you need to become. Go to the right factory.

Saying this I still really appreciate the education Carleton gave me and I have a strong sense of loyalty to the school, more so than my masters. As I start working I will be sure to keep in touch with my profs to push as many Carleton grad resumes forward as I can (and as quality allows for). If money comes my way, I'll pour it into the school. It's time to break that damn Ivy, Queens, McGill mold; but for now it exists.