wall street guide

So you’re a college sophomore and you want to break into Investment Banking. Maybe you’re a freshman that just heard about Investment Banking and want to learn more. Perhaps you’ve heard from older students who talked about the recruitment process, or you stumbled onto a Linkedin post from someone who landed a J.P Morgan offer and thought to yourself: “How do I get here?”

Every year, I get the same message from students a few weeks before their MBB interviews. They’ve spent months preparing: downloaded the frameworks, worked through the casebooks, and watched every YouTube video. Yet, they still aren’t sure if any of it is actually working.

Investment banking is one of the most selective entry-level career paths in the world. At top firms, acceptance rates for summer analyst roles are often estimated at well under 2–3%, with thousands of applicants competing for a limited number of spots. But here's what I've come to believe after watching this process play out over and over: "hard" doesn't mean random.

I get asked about Wall Street Prep a lot. Students want to know if it's worth the money, whether it'll actually help them get an offer, and whether there's something better they should be using instead. Here's my honest take: what it does well, what it doesn't, and how to think about whether it's the right investment for your specific situation.