Dan Evans writes about his internship in investment banking, giving a clear and honest account of both the good and the bad….

It’s 2am at the office. You’re waiting for a document back from a client, when the boss phones from a casino. He’s left his keys at work, and needs them sent from the Wharf to Kensington. You rifle wildly through papers, files, and presentations, find the keys and send them on their way. Back to waiting.

Late nights…

I didn’t realise then, that these nights would happen far too often. Life as an intern is tough, particularly in mergers and acquisitions. Early mornings, late nights, strict deadlines, coffee. I’d heard all about the glamour of investment banking. Think Wolfe, Easton Ellis. Big money, big houses, shoulder pads. High pressure, excitement, competition. On this basis it sounds like the perfect job for the aspiring graduate. Sadly, clever graduates quickly spot the obvious problems. The more interesting ones, however, take a while longer.

Everybody knows bankers work long hours. Not everybody knows how long. Typically I’d start work at 8:45. I’d eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at my desk, clocking off around midnight. Weekends were no exception. A bad night turns into the next morning, afternoon and evening. An early night means you catch a pint at the local before closing (just). Hearing this, you’d be justified in asking what these guys do all the time. In a nutshell, ‘investment bankers’ (those that work in mergers and acquisitions rather than traders, salesmen or quantitative analysts) present opportunities to clients. If there’s a bargain Kazakh power plant, or a cheap Russian oil field, your clients need to hear about it first. The problem comes from the fact that you can’t sell billion dollar assets with a smile and a wink.

The work

Enter the bane of a junior banker’s life: the pitch book. Pitch books need three things, each of which takes a long time. First, you talk about what’s going on in the industry. If you were looking at banking, for example, it’d be pretty negative: poor profits, redundancies. Oil would look better: strong profits, consolidation. Second, you’d concoct an economic valuation. Key questions include how much the assets stands to make in the future. For an oil field, this is simple: how much oil is left? How much can you produce each year? What will the oil price be in that year? Multiply these together, compensate for inflation and the cost of borrowing, and you come to a conclusion. Third, you need to convince the client to choose your bank over someone else’s. This usually means producing league tables which, through bending time, space, truth and moral integrity, always show that your bank is the best in the business. Every page in this presentation needs to be perfect. This means checking every fact and figure. If a shopkeeper underprices an orange, they lose pennies. If a banker underprices a company, they lose hundreds of millions.

The problem with bankers….

As for the people, well, if I’m going to spend the next ten years in an office making spreadsheets, I want to be sure I like the people I’m working with. Imagine living in a Sartre play. Office idiots are a fact of life, but living with one for a decade is cruel and unusual punishment. You can’t always choose your colleagues, but you can take certain precautions. If you’re looking for stimulating philosophical conversation and detailed literary discourse, banking probably isn’t for you. These guys barely have time to read the papers, let alone Jane Eyre. Once I spent a Sunday afternoon at a Dali exhibition. When I recounted this in the office, the guys at work thought he was a cricketer. Bankers aren’t idiots, just don’t expect intellectual visionaries.

It’s not all bad!

Banking seems like the worst job in the world: the hours are long, the people are challenging, and the work’s tiring and pedantic. You’d think, then, that you’d have to be crazy to choose this as a career. Strangely enough, this is exactly what I’m doing. Through all the garbled administrative bureaucracy, bankers do a great job of hiding the most fascinating and engaging profession. Investment banking, in a way, does deserve something of a negative reputation, given the absurd hours and the often dull personalities of those who work in the field. But what should not be obscured is that banking offers engaging, varied and intellectually stimulating work for which young graduates are amazinlgy well remunerated. Where else could a 22 year old graduate talk to a FTSE 100 CEO, sell an Egyptian oil field and a billion pound construction company? Where else could you earn enough in three years to fund a doctorate or a flat? We’ve all got friends on gap years, but imagine being able to travel in style, see the world, and enrol on the best intensive language courses available. Anybody can go travelling, not everyone can do it properly. Enjoy an engaging, interesting and challenging profession, free yourself from financial problems. Sign me up.