Hello and welcome. I'm Patrick Curtis, your host and Chief Monkey, and this is the Wall Street Oasis podcast. Join me as I talk to some of the community's most successful and inspirational members to gain valuable insight into different career paths and life in general. Let's get to it.

In this episode, member Mentor 1119 shares her path from a non-target university to breaking into a

bulge bracket investment bank. We cover why she decided to go into finance, how she leveraged certain programs

to give her a leg up in recruiting, as well as the group dynamics involved during her summer

analyst stint. Why she eventually left to go to the by side, why she bombed a case interview,

and one tip on how to avoid the same fate. Enjoy. All right. Mentor 1119. Thank you so much for joining the Wall Street Oasis podcast.

Thanks for having me.

So it'd be great if you could just give a quick bio, broad strokes to the listeners.

Yeah, sure.

So I graduated from undergrad about three years ago, and I immediately joined a bulge bracket investment

bank and was there for about two and a half years or so and then moved

over to the by side at a private debt fund where I was an associate for a little less than

a year and then I kind of moved over to grad school to do something a little bit different

but kind of just quick overview of my background in finance.

Awesome. So let's start back at your non-target school. And you're, so did you know kind of coming,

like as a freshman where you're like, I know I want to do finance or what kind of interested you

and potentially going down that road?

When was the kind of the first light bulb that went off that like this might be interesting to me?

Yeah. So I entered undergrad with absolutely no idea that I wanted to go into investment making.

I was at a business school, so I knew I wanted to study something within business.

I think how I approached my major was, you know, what am I good at, what sounds interesting,

and what is practical in terms of finding a job after school. That's fair.

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