So, why investment banking?

If you ever hope to enter the field, you’ll need to have a great answer to this question - because it’s something that every single interviewer will ask you.

But other guides do a poor job of guiding you on how to answer this question.

-You want to be a lifelong learner.

-You’ve done well in finance classes.

-You like a fast-paced environment.

And if you want to sound exactly the same as everyone else, feel free to use these types of responses.

So if you want to succeed in interviews, you need to be more personal and give answers that make an interviewer remember you and more likely to “go to bat” for you in the future.

You can accomplish this with the “Big Picture” method or the “Slice of Life” method.

If you’re a career changer, you don’t have a finance background, or you can’t think of anything specific that made you interested in finance, use the “Big Picture” method.

The outline is: Background in One Industry + Experience in Finance = Success in Achieving Long-Term Goals.

So maybe you’re an engineer and you want to do investment banking so that you can go into venture capital one day; or maybe you came from healthcare and you want to do investment banking so that you can advise healthcare companies on major financing decisions.

Don’t know what you want to do in the long-term? Not a problem - just make up goals and be consistent with what you say.

The “Slice of Life” method is better if you’ve had solid finance experience.

Here, you start off with a specific event that made you interested and then explain how that interest developed over time.

-You saw your parents day-trading when you were younger, so you then decided to start trading your own account, following the market, and doing a few investment internships.

-You went to a summer leadership camp and met top female executives at investment banks, which sparked your interest in the field.

Feel free to combine both of these methods, as well - just make sure your story doesn’t go on for 5 minutes.

Aim for a 20-30 second elevator pitch and you’ll be ahead of 90% of prospective bankers.

Riyan Richter blogs about the career search process, how to successfully network, and how to get into the finance industry at Mergers & Inquisitions, the web’s leading resource for investment banking and answering the why investment banking question in interviews.

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