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What the interviewer is testing
Whether you can tell a concise, logical story of your background that explains how you arrived at banking, and whether you communicate like someone a client could hear from.
Answer framework
- Keep it to about two minutes; it is a story, not a recital of every line.
- Start with a brief anchor: school, major or where your interest began.
- Pick two or three experiences and, for each, state the decision you made and what it taught you.
- Connect them to why you want banking, using a concrete moment.
- End with why you are interviewing now, then stop and let the interviewer ask questions.
Sample answer
I am a senior studying economics, and I first got interested in finance in my sophomore year, when I joined the student investment club and pitched a mid-cap industrial company. Building that valuation was the first time I saw how accounting, strategy and markets connect, and I wanted to do more of that work.
That led me to a summer internship at a corporate development team at a manufacturing company. I helped screen acquisition targets and built a simple comps analysis for one of them. The most valuable part was seeing how a deal moved from idea to board discussion, and also how much the advisers on the other side shaped that process. Last summer I interned in valuation advisory, where I worked on purchase price allocations and learned to be careful with models under deadline pressure.
Those experiences pointed me toward investment banking: I want to be closer to transactions from start to finish, work on a wide range of companies and learn fast in a demanding team. That is why I am recruiting for analyst roles now, and why I am interested in this group in particular.
Likely follow-ups
Common mistakes
- Reading the resume line by line.
- Talking for five minutes without a clear thread.
- Leaving out why banking and why now.
- Inventing a neat story that does not match your actual choices.
- Ending with a long list of skills instead of stopping.
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Related questions
Based on the fit questions section of the full question bank.