The Right Side of 20/20 Hindsight
An MBA is a fantastic way to launch a career in banking — whatever the flavor. Whether you choose to pursue a career track in equity research, investment banking, private banking, or sales and trading, there is nothing like having a far-reaching alumni-base through which to come up to speed on best practices and a set of likeminded, supportive classmates with whom to scale the (usually rather intense) recruiting processes. Add on access to the resources of a high caliber fellowship like Toigo, and a banking industry hopeful has some of the best chances at creating a lasting career that will be full of accomplishment and advancement.
My "story" is not unlike many of the traditional MBA-level banking entrants in some ways, but varies significantly in others. I chose to attend the MIT Sloan School of Management, a program I believed would (and successfully did) position me well given my interests and expectations, and I had a plan to pursue investment banking almost exclusively as summer internship recruiting began to heat up (I will touch upon why in a future blog entry). My prior academic training is in mechanical engineering and computer science and I was without any formal training in accounting or finance when I entered b-school. So like many MBA banking industry hopefuls, I was attempting to take my knowledge and thought ability from one area and apply them to another. However, unlike the typical MBA investment banking recruit, I had spent nearly six years working in various flavors of finance, including a year in investment banking as a senior analyst.
The choice to pursue investment banking — or any flavor of banking, for that matter — is one of those things in an MBA student’s career that you learn needs to be thought through and acted upon very quickly to avoid "missing the boat." Having a fairly diverse set of pre-MBA finance industry experiences (within financial strategy, equity research, and investment banking), I can concretely say that pursuing an MBA has been one of the best choices I could have made in considering a longer-term career in banking. In my case, there is a level of sophistication in analysis and sheer confidence in thought and action (among a plethora of additional benefits) that I would not have been able to achieve without gaining the opportunity to sit in classes among some of the most talented and ambitious people in the world or to associate with an organization like Toigo. A top MBA program and its environmental accoutrements, such as access to Toigo, act collectively as a laboratory that works to meld prior experiences and ambition (…and I am sure there’s a case to be made for several other "major" inputs) into an informed, action-oriented package with a significantly widened set of opportunities. …and as a person who almost chose to never "go back" to get an MBA given my relatively long pre-MBA tenure in finance, I can attest to the satisfaction of being on the right side of 20/20 hindsight.
Next Up:
* Banking as a post-MBA career path
Next-Next Up:
* Toigo’s role in my MBA experience
Allen T. Lamb | MIT Sloan School of Management | MBA Class of 2010
