How To Land A Lucrative Finance Job Without A Perfect GPA

A Former Analyst Is Helping Students Increase Their Chances Of Landing These Coveted Jobs

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Mr. Massedge speaking at a Finance Conference at the University of Connecticut

Goldman Sachs, Apollo Global, Fidelity, Bain Capital, BlackRock, Sequoia. All high powered firms that even top business students can only dream about.

Yet recently, there’s been an unusual increase in lesser qualified students landing these prestigious jobs over even top business students.

We decided to find out why.

One of the culprits? The Invest Like the Street Program

Wall Street is known for being notoriously difficult when it comes to landing a job or internship.

Every year, thousands of students from the top schools in the world compete against each other to land a high-paying job or internship at an Investment Bank or Hedge Fund.

Can you blame them? The average investment banking salary plus bonus will easily net these students more than $100k a year. No wonder it’s such a competitive field.

So how are lesser qualified candidates beating out students from Ivy league colleges for these jobs?

Every year Harvard University holds its annual stock pitch competition. They receive hundreds of pitches from groups of students accross the country and have the tough task of narrowing it down to the Top 15 groups to come present in the final round, live in front of a panel of judges.

As you might expect, most of the groups of students come from Ivy League schools. But this year there was an outlier: a group of students from a non-target school made it to finals.

We decided to find out how they did it.

We spoke with Max Janik, one of the students who made it to the finals from the non-target school. His answer? An online analyst training program called The Invest Like the Street Program that is helping students stand out in interviews and land more jobs by giving them real, on-the-job assignments that Wall Street firms expect their employees to learn.

According to Max, “The Invest Like the Street program was the biggest factor in our success in the competition. The ITLS program taught us how to find stock ideas, build accurate financial models and valuations, and how to write a stock report. Our business school curriculum doesn’t us teach any of those skills so without ITLS we probably wouldn’t have made it past the first round of the competition.”

So far it’s working. Students who have completed the program have gone on to land jobs and internships at investment banks, hedge funds and wealth management firms.

It wasn’t just Max either who ended up being very successful.

Dustin Fowler, a student at the University of Connecticut, was able to land an internship at a hedge fund during the summer of his sophomore year.

Mark Chanatry, an international politics major at Boston College, landed a job in GE’s prestigious Financial Management Program.

Brendan Flynn, an Invest Like the Street graduate and sophomore at Boston College, has already started writing for Seeking Alpha (check out his recent article here).

The program’s creator, Todd Massedge, says the program has been key in helping students land these internships and jobs because it’s showing employers that these students can do the work required at investment banks, hedge funds, and wealth management firms.

According to Mr. Massedge:

“Employers on Wall Street want to hire students that actually know what they’re doing. They want to see that you understand investing, financial analysis, modeling, etc. They love hiring students with practical experience. 

Invest Like the Street graduates end up knowing as much as an experienced Investment Banking or Hedge Fund analyst that the people that interview graduates are usually so blown away by how much these students know at such a young age that it’s an easy hiring decision for them, regardless of GPA and school. Just having the program on your resume has exponentially increased the amount of offers our students have been getting.”

So how does the program work?

According to Mr. Massedge:

“Students get one-on-one training with one of our instructors and cover topics such as understanding different business models, how to break down and analyze a business, financial analysis and accounting, DCF modeling, advanced modeling, how to pitch a stock, and how to write research reports.

Each student is given a publicly traded company to complete a variety of assignments on during the program, such as building models, and have to submit each assignment for us to review and get feedback on. Therefore, each student gets the hands-on experience to complete real on-the-job work, versus just watching an instructional video which can be boring as hell.”

A look into the Invest Like the Street program

As an added bonus, Todd and his team critique the resumes of interested for free, regardless of whether or not they enroll in the program. They also show students how to modify their resumes to bypass the resume scanning software on companies websites and land more interviews:

“We always do that, absolutely. Look, we’re here because we want to help these students succeed. I was in the same position only a few years ago and remember how shitty it is. If you’re interested in the program, that’s great, just apply on our site and we go through your resume automatically. If not, that’s okay, just shoot us an email and we’d be happy to take a look at your resume and give you some pointers. We are always happy to give back and heavily encourage all of our students to do the same thing one day.”

For those interested in learning more about the program, Todd tells potential students to head to their website here and check out some of the other bonuses they offer as well.

To learn more about Todd and his team, you can take a look at some of the links below:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/18-questions-todd-massedge-200738009.html 

For career advice or resume help, you can contact Todd here:

[email protected]

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