Guide To Investment Banking

1. Tell Me About Yourself

This is the most common question and you should definitely take the time to prepare and customize it for each interview.

Instead of casually telling your life story, grab the opportunity to set the stage and guide your interview to ask questions to your advantage. How to do it? You can see how I handled my own investment banking interview questions here.

2. Tell Me More About This Experience In The Resume


For follow-on answers related to your resume, it helps if you can give concise example with specific information and data (remember, finance people LOVE numbers). This can give your answer a lot of substance.

3. What Do You Like Best About Your School / Current Job?


Try to pick an example that can show the attributes of good investment bankers, e.g. fast learner, taking ownership of work, the ability to work long hours and handle stress.

For example, you can talk about your experience in a non-profit organization where you lead a team of X number of students to teach underprivileged children in your neighborhood for Y years, where you learn by experience how to raise funds and handle unanticipated and stressful situations. (the phrases in bold italic are good keywords)

4. What Is The Most Challenging Situation You Ever Face, And How Did You Overcome It? 

This is essentially the same question but with a negative tone (and thus more tricky). In addition to putting in the relevant keywords, do remember to end the answer with a positive spin.

5. Have You Ever Worked Under Intense Stress? What Is It And How Do You Deal With It? 

This is a variation of the question above, but even more applicable to an entry-level investment banking job where you will bound to experience many stressful situation. Again, the most important thing is to end with a positive note.

6. Please Give Me An Example On How You Learn From A Mistake. 

Same as above, but more general. A good answer would be to talk about a specific example where you learn about a few key i-banking attributes from this experience.

7. What Motivates You To Bring Out Your Best In A Job?

This is a question on both your passion and your strength. Try to combine the two and give a specific example.

8. How Do You See Yourself 5-10 Years From Now?


This is a favorite among senior bankers, because they want to figure out what the “kids” aspire to these days.

The best way is to answer the question in stages.
For example, you have set goals for yourself to achieve such and such (clearly success in the i-bank you are interviewing at must be one of them, but shouldn’t be the only one) and talk about how we plan to achieve them within this time frame. In this way, you get yourself covered without sounding too cliché.