The Wall Street career path can be brutal. Young people are embracing it.
April 16, 2025
When Gustavo Schwed was considering a career in finance in the late 1980s, climbing the corporate ladder was a preoccupation for working people, not students.
"People didn't really give their job as much thought until, really, the summer between their junior and senior year — if then," said Schwed, a New York University professor who started in investment banking and then worked in private equity for about 25 years.
The path to enter Wall Street has changed radically since then. Investment banks now compete with multibillion-dollar hedge funds, private equity firms, "elite boutique" banks, and even tech companies for talent, resulting in a mad rush for recruits earlier than ever.
Students who aspire to become dealmakers, traders, and investors must begin preparing as soon as their freshman year to win
the internships
that open the right doors. Those who wait or don't learn the recruiting game quickly enough risk being left behind.
Even willing participants recognize the absurdity. A Wharton student who recently signed a 2026 internship offer at an investment bank put it this way: "I am a sophomore in college, and it's kind of outrageous that we have to decide at this age — I just turned 20 — what my first job is out of college."
They're just among the hundreds of students Business Insider heard from for a new series of stories, beginning today and publishing over the next few weeks, focused on the path to Wall Street. All together, they provide a compelling look at how Wall Street is changing, and the impact it's having on hungry young job-seekers.
So why are they doing it? What is motivating
record numbers of students
in some cases to pursue Wall Street jobs when the path is such an obstacle course? And do they understand
how crushing
an entry-level job on Wall Street can be, with stories of people
collapsing from exhaustion
?
To help answer these questions, Business Insider sent out a survey to undergraduate finance students and members of campus finance clubs — which are often used as a stepping stone to a Wall Street internship — asking about their career tracks, expectations, and motivations. In addition to the 150 survey responses we received across about a dozen schools (which is not a scientifically representative sample), we also interviewed about 30 students from schools such as the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, and New York University. They asked to be anonymous to protect their future careers.
The students we talked to expressed complicated feelings about their chosen career track. Some of them have embraced the challenge, while others said they worried about the industry's reputation for chewing up young talent. They are skeptical of Wall Street institutions' recent promises to do more to
protect them
from burnout, but ultimately feel they have little choice if they want a career in investment banking, private equity, or hedge funds.
Investment banking still rules at the entry level
It used to be that investment banking was the only point of entry to the vast majority of finance jobs, but many hedge funds and private equity firms, including the investment behemoths
Balyasny
and
Citadel
, are now investing in their own training programs.
Despite the growing number of options, most of our survey respondents — 74% — said they planned to start their finance careers through the traditional investment banking path. In interviews, students said they saw this path as opening the most doors, making it ideal for people who aren't quite sure what they want to be when they grow up.
As one Columbia junior who has secured an investment bank internship explained: Investment banking is simply ground zero for every other job in finance. (It also offers the most entry-level jobs in finance.)
"There's so many avenues in which you can kind of exit," the Columbia student said, referencing opportunities to get recruited to work for hedge funds, private equity, and even private credit, which raises money to make unregulated loans.
The Wharton student agreed, saying the range of possibilities was the most attractive reason to pursue banking after graduation.
"If I like it, I can stay with it. If I don't, there are other opportunities out there," he said. "I think working at a job like investment banking keeps those doors open."
The downsides to a career in finance
When the students were asked to rate their level of concern with five common topics relevant to a finance career — on a scale of 1 to 4, with 1 being not concerned about a given point and 4 being very concerned — long hours had the highest average score, followed by high stress.
Entry-level investment bankers, who carry titles like analyst and associate, are known to clock in anywhere from
80 to 100 hours a week
, often working on tedious tasks like formatting PowerPoint presentations and cleaning up Excel sheets. The junior banker lifestyle can be so grueling that
entire businesses
have spawned to poke fun at it online. Hours can be less onerous at private equity and other so-called buyside firms, but still much more than a 9-to-5 job.
The debate about junior banker working conditions intensified during the pandemic, when M&A jumped to record levels, and again last year following the death of a 35-year-old Bank of America associate. His cause of death was a coronary blood clot, which prompted widespread speculation and drew attention within the bank to what current and former employees said were weaknesses in systems for
tracking junior banker hours
. Bank of America and
JPMorgan
later announced
new guardrails
meant to prevent burnout.
The students who spoke with BI, however, said they didn't believe Wall Street's hard-charging apprenticeship model would change.
"Who are the decision-makers? It's people who are 20, 30 years older. They don't care. It's just the generation they were raised in," a junior at New York University said.
A second NYU student described the long hours and tedious work as a rite of passage — a badge of honor, of sorts.
"I feel like it's a culture of giving back, but in a negative way. People I talk to are like: 'Wow, you guys are so lucky as analysts, you guys can actually go home to sleep. Back in my day, you slept at the desk.'"
What they want
To understand students' motivations for pursuing finance careers, we asked them to score the importance of five factors they might want in their first job on a scale of 1 to 4, with 1 being "not important" and 4 "very important."
Students rated compensation and exit opportunities, or the ability to transition to better roles or firms, as the two most important factors.
Investment banks pay their entry-level analysts upward of
$110,000 in base salary
with year-end bonuses that can add anywhere from $40,000 to $60,000 to their yearly compensation, depending on deal activity. (By comparison, the average yearly wage in the US is about $66,000, according to the
Social Security Administration
.)
Finances also ranked highly when it came to long-term goals. When asked about their future careers, the majority rated financial freedom as the most important quality. Meaningful work and the ability to control their own schedules ranked lowest in importance on a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 being the most important.
What students really want could also be gleaned from their write-in answers to other survey questions. When asked about their dream finance jobs, many of them spoke of investing or becoming their own boss one day.
Some 29 out of 150 write-in responses included aspirations of entrepreneurship, running their own business, or holding a C-Suite position.
These responses included aspirations like being an "entrepreneur," "starting my own business," "running my own investment firm," as well as becoming a "CFO of a Fortune 500 company" and "CIO of a hedge fund."
Many of these answers also overlapped with buy-side aspirations — like students who said their dream was to "own my own hedge fund," or "run my own small PE firm."
Eighty-five answers (equivalent to about 57% of respondents) mentioned private equity, hedge funds, or venture capital in some way. Notably, just 15 answers about long-term dream jobs in finance mentioned banking.
Determined to succeed
Students interviewed by BI seemed to understand the challenges they could face on Wall Street. Some said they welcomed the grind.
"My goal, especially right out of college in those first five years from when I'm 22 to like 27, is to work as hard as I can," the sophomore at Wharton told BI, adding, "I think people that work hard get rewarded."
Other students seemed to see Wall Street's hard-charging apprenticeship model as the price of entry. An NYU student whose older sibling also took the investment banking career track said she was nervous but pushing ahead.
"My dad was really worried," she said of her sibling's early banking career. "It does scare me, but that's just part of the job. We already know that. You know this going into it."
Of course, few undergrads have actually experienced 80- or 100-hour workweeks, as another Georgetown student noted.
"Saying that to a lot of people who have not worked even, like, 40 hours in a week before in their lives with no conceptualization of a normal workweek — that's going to go in one ear and come out the other," the student said.
This student avoided the traditional investment banking route specifically because of its reputation for grinding down young talent.
"Part of my consideration for asset management was definitely like, I would not risk my own mortality by a career choice," he told BI.
And while most seemed to accept the prospect of being tethered to their desks, one student said she planned to push back if demands got too onerous.
"Any job, regardless of exit opportunities, how much you're passionate about the job, how much larger your pay — it should not be killing its employees," said the second NYU student, who is set to intern at an investment bank this summer. "There's just certain things I won't compromise regardless of outcome. I think dying is one of those things. You know, if you think you're going to be hospitalized in a day, you feel faint in a day, like, I think you just have to set boundaries."
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