Investment Banker
The pay is real and it comes fast: a first-year analyst straight out of college can clear $170K. The work behind it is the analysis, building the numbers and the story a billion-dollar decision rests on, and the edge is judgment: knowing what those numbers mean.
Related: Management Consultant, Founder, Data Analyst
The day in the life
Northwind · what it is worth
A lowest and a highest number, for Harlan's meeting
- •Northwind: roasts its own coffee, runs its own cafes
- •sells about $210 million a year, still growing
- •nothing on the page yet, just the question
the blank page, before you start
Northwind is for sale. What do you look at to work out a fair price: what it sells, what it keeps after costs, or what other coffee companies sold for?
Try a day as an investment banker
A short, playful taste of the real work.
Very well paid and doing fine, but brutally hard to get into, and there are fewer of the starting jobs than there used to be.
No school is officially required, but banks pick almost everyone they hire from a handful of well known universities, so very few people get in.
What you’d do all day
The picture is closing huge deals; the reality for a new analyst is building financial models in Excel (spreadsheets that put a number on a company) and pitch decks in PowerPoint, for 60-80 hours a week, under constant deadlines. The tools now do more and more of that grunt work, so what stays valuable is the judgment on top: knowing what the numbers mean and what to recommend.
- Modeling & analysis35%
- Slide decks30%
- Research & digging into the company20%
- Client & deal-process10%
- Winning new deals & clients5%
Two thirds of the day is building the tables of numbers and the slideshows. You almost never meet the company paying for all this.
The title’s the same everywhere, but the actual work splits into a few different tracks.
- Mergers & dealshelping one company buy, sell, or merge with another.
- Stock researchstudying public companies and telling investors whether to buy their stock.
- Tradingbuying and selling stocks and bonds for the bank’s clients, all day, in real time.
A typical early-career day
- 10:00Catch up & research
Read overnight emails, pull filings and market data, and tee up what the team needs today.
- 11:30Build the model
Work in Excel, build or update the model that values a company or a deal. Get every number right.
- 2:00Make the deck
Turn the analysis into a clean pitch deck in PowerPoint. Formatting matters more than you’d think.
- 7:00Senior mark-ups
A senior banker sends edits, sometimes at 11pm. Revise, re-check, send it back. Repeat.
- 9:00The grunt work, fast
The comparisons, the data cleanup, the first-draft slides get done fast now; you check it, fix it, and own the result.
A first year analyst day runs late into the night, with weekend fire drills. The grind eases as you move up, where the work becomes clients and deals.
The outlook
Where it’s going
Banking isn’t shrinking: deal activity is recovering into 2026 and pay is holding firm. What’s changing is the junior rung: AI now does the modeling, comparisons, and slide-building that used to take a team of analysts, so one analyst can now do what three did. The result is smaller, leaner analyst classes, and a new edge for people who can run those tools well.
Right now
It’s a healthy, well-paid industry, but getting in is brutally competitive and the front door is getting narrower, as banks shrink their junior classes even while business is good. The path in is structured and tight, mostly running through recruiting at certain schools into a set analyst program, so breaking in rewards standing out early over just showing up.
Would you like it?
Worth a look if you like digging through numbers when a lot of money is riding on them, and you want to be the one who got it right.
Tap any that sound like you.
In practice, people realize it’s their thing when…
…and it probably isn’t their thing when
How people get in
- 4
- Years it takes on average
- $48K
- Average cost
- A handful of colleges
- What decides it most
Every way in
A finance or business degree
About 8 in 10
Four years · About $48K at a public college, much more at a private one
A year at NYU is $70,464 in tuition and fees, and $102,886 once living in New York is counted.
A summer at a bank in your second year
About 2 in 10
Four years · They pay you
At two of the banks, doing well in that second year summer means the next summer is offered to you instead of you competing for it again.
Those are the two, and the second one feeds the first. There is a separate way in for people leaving the military as well: Goldman runs a three week program for them twice a year, and more than 100 finance firms run a yearly event together for the same reason.
How your first job gets decided
There is no exam you can sit to get in. What decides it is your resume, and the name of the college on it does more work than anything else on the page.
What employers check
- Which college you are at. The banks spend most of their recruiting money on about 5 schools, chase about 15 more a good deal less hard, and barely look anywhere else.
- One day of interviews. First a recorded video interview of about half an hour, then a single day of up to five interviews back to back.
- Not the licence. Investment bankers do hold one, a $395 exam of 75 questions with 2 hours 30 minutes to answer them, and you cannot sit it until a bank has hired you and put you forward, so it can never be the thing that got you in.
The first job is analyst, straight out of college, and it almost always goes to somebody who spent the summer before it working at that same bank.
- A finance degree earns about $83,300 four years after you finish, counting everyone who takes one.
- A finance master’s earns about $110,700. Most people with either degree never work at a bank, which is why both numbers sit so far below what a first year analyst is paid.
When to apply
Banks choose people about two years before the job starts, so the applications that matter come while you are still in your second year of college.
- Second year of collegeGoldman runs a program only for people in their second year of college, the ones finishing between December 2028 and June 2029. Applications open in the autumn and the program runs that December, a full year before the summer job most people think of as the start.
- The summer after second yearBank of America and Santander both run paid summers for second years, ten weeks each, and JPMorganChase runs a paid five week one. At the first two, doing well means the following summer is handed to you rather than fought over.
- By October 4Applications for a summer that does not begin for another eight or nine months close in early October. Anyone who starts looking in the spring of that year has already missed it.
How long it takes
College
Four years
A summer at a bank
Usually after your third year
Analyst
The first job, straight from college
Four years in total, and the step that decides it happens in the middle of them rather than at the end.
The work itself is deciding what a whole company is worth when nobody knows the answer. You can try one of those in a few minutes.
Try working out what a company is worthThink Like an Analyst: Make the Call on a Real Company
Pick a real company you care about, read what it tells everyone about how its year went, and answer one question: would you put your own savings into this company, or keep them somewhere else? Write down the reasons to say yes, the reasons to say no, and the answer you land on, with evidence for it. Looking at both sides and then picking one you can argue for is exactly what this job is (and you check every number yourself, because being wrong is expensive).
Where these numbers come from
Written by the Sidequest team, from the sources below.
- Pay: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Securities, Commodities & Financial Services Sales Agents (SOC 41-3031), May 2024 (broad category; investment bankers sit at the top end); Mergers & Inquisitions 2026 comp report; Wall Street Oasis; WSJ (managing-director pay).
- The outlook: BLS OOH (SOC 41-3031, May 2024); Mergers & Inquisitions 2026 comp report; Wall Street Oasis (analyst-class cuts); McKinsey on AI in banking; Fortune (AI skepticism). Dated June 2026.
- Getting in: How many people take each route is our own estimate, rounded. O*NET OnLine 13-2051.00 (Financial and Investment Analysts), Job Zone Four, SVP 7.0 to under 8.0, site updated August 25 2026, read September 2026, for the four years; O*NET states on that page that only part of this occupation’s profile has been collected, so it publishes no education responses for it and none are stated here. Lauren Rivera’s study of hiring at elite banks, law firms and consulting firms, through Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management summary of it, read September 2026, for the three to five core schools and the further five to fifteen the banks recruit from; the study reports no figure for how much this costs a candidate from anywhere else and none is stated. Goldman Sachs Emerging Leaders Series page, read September 2026, for the second year students, the autumn 2026 applications and the December 2026 program. Bank of America Global Investment Banking Sophomore Summer Analyst Program posting and Santander’s own sophomore program page, read September 2026, for the two ten week summers and the offer of the following year’s place. Goldman Sachs 2027 Summer Analyst Program page, read September 2026, for applications closing October 4 2026. Goldman Sachs student preparation page, read September 2026, for the thirty minute recorded interview and the two to five final interviews in one day. FINRA Series 79 page, read September 2026, for the requirement that a member firm sponsor you before you may sit it. Goldman Sachs Veterans Integration Program page, read September 2026, for the three weeks and the two 2026 groups. U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard, field of study data, CIP 52.08 Finance and Financial Management Services at bachelor level, read September 2026, for the $83,300 median four years out across 43,799 graduates; that covers everyone with a finance degree and not this job. College Board, Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2025, public four year in state tuition and fees of $11,950 a year, for the $48K four year total; New York University estimated cost of attendance 2026-2027, for the $102,886 a year. Dated September 2026.