Career Path: Investment Banking | Guest: Eric Stein, Global Chairman, Investment Banking, JPMorgan

Switching gears to Investment Banking as I chat with Eric Stein, Global Chairman of Investment Banking for JPMorgan.  Eric has had a tremendously successful career at JPMorgan but his initial path wasn't the typical IB path.  Listen in to hear his message around work ethic and passion for the finance space. Plus, he shares advice on how to prepare for the investment banking summer analyst interview process.

Some links references in this episode

A few platforms to help prepare for the IB summer analyst interview process:
Training the Street
Breaking into the Street

Information on tech platforms used during the interview process:
Pymetrics
HireVue
CNBC article about JPM's use of tech platforms during the hiring process

LAUNCH Career Strategies was founded by Karen Elders and Elyse Spalding. We help young professionals launch a successful career path with expert coaching services. Reach out today for an initial FREE coaching session.
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Transcript

Are you looking for your first internship or job or maybe the next step in your career? Welcome to Top of the Pile, the podcast explores all things career for 20 somethings. I'm Karen Elders with Launch Career Strategies, and I'll be your host. Let's get started. All right. Welcome back, Top of the Pile. This week on Top of the Pile, we are shifting over to investment banking. My guest today is Eric Stein, Global Chairman of Investment Banking at JP Morgan. Eric graduated with an economics degree from Hobart College and went on to complete his MBA in finance from NYU Stern School of Business. Eric has spent his entire career at JPMorgan, which is pretty amazing. And I think it's nice to note that along the way, he's been known to be very generous with his personal time to help young people navigate the investment banking career search process and just the overall finance process. So I'm honored to have Eric. on as a guest today. So welcome, Eric. Thank you very, very happy to be here and happy to talk about the investment banking world. Cool, cool. Okay, so we'll jump in. So you're an economics major in your undergrad, and then you went and directly got your MBA right after your undergrad. So when did you know or was there something that sparked a moment that sparked your interest? When did you know you wanted to pursue investment banking? So I have a bit of an interesting story and I wouldn't say I'm necessarily the prototypical investment banking hires, so to speak, particularly back in 1989 when I joined. I actually didn't start at JPMorgan within investment banking. I think it's a good lesson for your listeners. I actually joined a program called the Masters in Accounting Program at old JPMorgan, which was called Morgan Guarantee at the time. And basically the program was going to JP Morgan's Controllers Group, do a bunch of rotations, and then find a permanent spot within the Controllers Group, all while getting your, at the time, Master's in Accounting at NYU. So I started at JP Morgan the day after I graduated. I literally graduated on June 12th, or June 11th. And. went home to Buffalo, repack my stuff, flew to New York and started at NYU the next morning. And the first summer was going to school, taking full-time classes. And then we started this rotational program in September. Ultimately got the master's in accounting degree in an 18 month period. But I, as you noted, I went on and I applied those credits to get my MBA in finance because I thought it was more marketable. But I really joined JP Morgan. in this pretty unique program in the controllers group. And admittedly, I knew nothing about banking coming into it. I came to JP Morgan because I knew it was a very good brand name in the marketplace. It was in New York City. And I figured if I had an interesting banking experience on my resume, that would be positive. And I just assumed I'd move back to Buffalo back in the day. And 32 years later, I'm still here. So. It's all worked out, but I didn't really know that I wanted to get into banking at that point in time. It wasn't until I got my feet wet at JP Morgan that I said, you know, doing this back office stuff in the controllers group is interesting, but I don't think it necessarily leverages everything that I'm good at. And so I saw, when I started to figure out what investment banking was, from a distance, I said, why would I want to get into that? And I liked the fact that I could be in front of clients. I thought that leveraged a skill set that I would be decent at. I saw that I could make more money. And at the time I had a lot of student loans and that was appealing. And I really had this mental debate and I think it's a really important one for anybody getting into banking around, am I... Am I more cut out for investment banking, or am I more cut out for sales and trading? And when someone's coming out of college in particular, I'm not sure they really appreciate the differences between the two. And I wasn't one of those people that, when I thought about sales and trading and sitting on a trading floor and making quick decisions around math and taking loads of risk, that wasn't who I was as a person. I thought I was much better suited for grinding it out, taking my time, being thoughtful around the analytics that go into the investment banking world. And I was prepared and comfortable dealing with the longer hours. Sales and trading, you're in at seven and you're generally out at six. And investment banking, you know, You might be in at nine, but who knows when you're leaving? It all depends on what projects you're working on. So I just felt like investment banking was a pretty interesting opportunity to get into and would fit my skillset. That's great. It's great. I think all of that is so important. And if you're a young person that maybe... isn't sure still if they want to dive into that analyst summer internship their junior year or you know are there programs post-grad that exist? Yeah there are a number of programs that exist and I always encourage people don't get discouraged if you're shooting for one of the brand name firms and you don't get a banking internship. There are... other ways to ultimately achieve your goal if you want to get into banking. So I've encouraged many people to look at our commercial bank, look at our financial management program at JP Morgan, look at one of a number of programs that exist. And we take internal transfers all the time after a year, after two years, etc. And many times, there are best performers down the road. I think sometimes people get the impression that, well, unless you get that internship in banking, you're screwed and you're never gonna have an opportunity. And that's just couldn't be further from the truth. If you come into a place like JPMorgan and you do well in one of the other groups, that is a huge feather in your cap, which will help you move over and transfer into banking. Yeah, and I think it's actually a true piece of advice for any career path that you're on that I'm a big believer in. You go select your choices or make your choices based on good companies that you align with, their values, their mission, what they do, their products, and all of that, their leadership team, as opposed to just a specific role that you'll take anywhere. Go for the companies and... you know, wherever you are, if you go speak to the HR group and say, you know what, I've really worked hard. I put my head down. I love this company, but I noticed that department over there is really where I'd like to point my, my ship and end up. And you know, can you consider me? And I think 99% of the time they appreciate that. And you know, if whatever, if you've done a good job, whatever department you're in, I think they're not going to I know people get afraid, but HR should be confidential in that. But they'll support you most of the time and say, OK, good for you. You're doing a good job. Couldn't agree more. And I would say that supports you 100% of the time, at least from what I've seen. I've only worked at JP Morgan. But if you've done a good job, you generally have earned the right to help direct where you want to take your career. And like I said, when I was a first started and I was in this controllers group and I had finished my MBA. I said, okay, well, I guess I have to leave JP Morgan to go do banking. And I was at NYU, I took advantage of their recruiting program and I had an opportunity to go into sales and trading at Merrill Lynch at the time. And I had an opportunity to go to what was then Barclays, which is a different Barclays than it is today. And when I got the job at Merrill, I said yes to them. And I remember they offered me in person, I walked back to my desk and I had a panic attack. I was like, not literally, but it might've been a literal panic attack. And I called my brother and I called a good friend of ours collectively who was in sales and trading. And I'm like, what am I doing? This is not me, right? To my point earlier about really being self aware of what you think you're going to be good at and what leverages your strengths. And I just said to myself, this is not me. So I remember calling them up and telling them I made a mistake and they weren't very nice about it. And it wasn't a great phone call to make, but eventually what I did, I was going to go to the Barclays and go to Barclays and take that position. I remember going in and talking to my boss and he said, what are you doing? Why are you why are you doing this? You can do this here. And I was sort of shocked. I didn't really realize that. And so I went around and I guess I technically interviewed with four or five people and I got the role to go and switch over. And so that's not to say you need to resign to leverage yourself into another group. I was just pretty naive to think. I couldn't just go have the conversation in the first place, which is what I should have done. Right. But you're young and it's like, everyone's afraid of you don't know. And it is a good lesson to hear to not be afraid of you just the point of being honest and communicating and believe in your value. So that's cool. I love that. One of the things that's always when we've talked that JP Morgan has really done a good job and made such an effort. as I'm sure many of these institutions have, to level the playing field and open up the application process as opposed to just recruiting out of a few top schools. So I think this is interesting to hear. Can you take me through a little bit of what your insights are about the hiring process for a summer analyst, summer internship? Over the years, for a number of years, I ran our banking practice in North America. And we always had this debate around what's the right way to recruit our younger people and our younger talent to make sure we got the right quality of people the right level of diversity in our in our incoming analyst class etc. And what we typically done for years is go to what we called target. core schools and then we would go to some non-core schools. So I went to Hobart, that was a non-core school. Harvard and Penn and the typical Ivies and Duke and others were target core schools. What we found was we weren't necessarily getting enough diversity. We weren't getting the kind of candidate who really wanted to do it in a deep way. And so what ended up happening is we had some calls with some outside vendors who did some things with technology. And we thought in this world of technology, why can't we leverage that to get a broader set of candidates that we can quickly assess and then hopefully get a more diverse, more level playing field, dare I say less entitled. a group of people. And I don't say entitled to be critical, but a lot of times, you know, people will come in and they will have certain demands and expectations because of their background. And what we ended up doing was we switched to this group called, I guess it's the name of the company. If you go online and you look at our application process, you take a Pymetrix test and I haven't done it. So I can't claim to have actually taken it myself. And it's not so much a test as there's no right and wrong answer, but it really matches, you answer a bunch of questions and it's almost a game. And the way you play the game, we look at those results and measure them against people who have been successful at JPMorgan and how they've done. And If we get several thousand candidates applying from all different schools, you can apply from, you know, whether you're from Harvard or whether you're from a state school across anywhere in the any four-year accredited school, you can you can apply. And if you take Pymetrics and the person from some random school that wasn't typically a core or non-core school that we ever recruited from, If their answers or the way they played the Pymetrix game matches better than the Harvard student, then that student is going to be into the next level of the recruiting process. And that next level of the recruiting process is you go through what we call higher view, which I think some people, as I talked to inbound analysts, they take pretty regularly. And it's basically for us, it's three questions. I think it's a minute task to answer the three questions. It's a video recorded process. And then we have people that review those video recordings. So between Pymetrics, the higher view video recording, we can then narrow what is several thousand candidates as opposed to several hundred. And we get a much bigger pool. And we can now narrow that down to bring people in for a super day, which is the on site, you know, six interviews that people typically do as part of the interview process. And what we found is we get a much broader crowd of people. Our ability to have a more diverse population is significantly increased. And We're only a couple years into it. The investment banking recruiting process takes a while. If you start recruiting anywhere from the summer to the fall of your junior year to get the internship in the summer to then a year later arrive full time and then two years to do your analyst program, it takes a little while to see the results because of the lead time. But so far so good in terms of the quality of people were getting in, their hunger level, their desire to do the business, as opposed to just have it on your resume, like genuine intellectual curiosity about investment banking. And the other important thing is, was we really want to have balance in our analyst class. So that includes people of all races. And it includes wanting to have and targeting 50% of our class being female. Yeah, okay, I love that. And that's, you know, it's a really, there's a lot of conversation around these technologies and these platforms right now and how they're, are they effective, are they working? So it's interesting to hear that you guys are finding it is effective. Reality of it is, if you think about the old way, you'd get a bunch of resume submissions from, pick the target schools that you're looking at. you'd immediately go to, well, what's their G, what's their major, what's their GPA, and did they have any extracurriculars? And that's great. But, you know, a lot of times there are students, like right now, I believe, don't quote me on this, but I believe our cutoff to apply, um, and go through all of this is a 3.2, you know, a lot of times you'll have somebody in a really hard major. get a chemical engineering or electrical engineering or whatever, and they'll have a 3.25 or a 3.3 and you'll have somebody, not that other majors are quote unquote a lot easier, but pick another major and I won't name any, but there's, you get a three nine and what is maybe an easier major. What's better? You know, I don't know. The answer is, I don't really know, but if you're just looking at the GPA as a critical cutoff and your bias is to look at people with 36, 38, 39, whatever the number is, you're gonna miss out on someone that could be an awesome candidate who, for whatever reason, has a 3.3 GPA. And I've often said about this industry, and I will admit, I've made it pretty far, over 32 years, I wouldn't put myself at the top of the chain from a SAT score and all that stuff. I had as much EQ as I did, probably more, definitely more EQ than IQ. And... You don't have to be the smartest person in the room. You have to be smart enough, right? And once you're smart enough, there is all sorts of other things that are super important to being successful. Do you listen? Do you engage with people? Are you stubborn? Do you have empathy? There's all sorts of things that can work for you and against you. And this is a good example. This goes back 20 plus years, but we had an analyst in the group I was in who literally wrote a book in college about foreign exchange. And like, I couldn't, I remember starting to work with this guy and I couldn't believe that this guy had, and he went to Harvard and he literally wrote a book. And I'm thinking, my God, when I was in college, the last thing in the world I was thinking about was writing a book, let alone on foreign exchange. And he was a, and he had a, you know, 4.0 and all the things you would like to see on a resume. He was a terrible analyst. Terrible because he thought he had it all figured out. And, you know, he, he just, he didn't listen. He didn't cooperate. He wouldn't follow guidance and instruction. And eventually we had to say, you know what, this isn't for you. And he, and he moved on, um, because he just didn't have all the other things. He was one of those guys I often say was 110% smart, but he had like. 40% of the other skills. And if you need to be 80%, you know, in terms of chaining the bar, um, to understand the concepts. but you've got all the other things, you're gonna do great. Cause this isn't, what we do is not rocket science. It's general, basic. I was talking to someone the other day, it's adding, subtracting, dividing and multiplying. And if you, you know, we're not talking about, you know, complex derivatives and da da. We're talking about general corporate finance and using basic analytics. to then develop judgment to advise clients on how to value companies, how to think about buying and selling companies, how to think about raising capital. And like I said, you just need to be smarter. Yeah, it's, I think it's like, hallelujah, you know, to hear that. And I remember I had Jennifer Foster from Chilton Investments on top of the pile, and she was an English major undergrad. And she went on to graduate school and at Harvard, but she you know before she worked in between the two and she said that she was posed a question during one of her interviews and it was about how, you know, what are your analytical skills? How do you think analytically creative problem solve? And she gave an example of writing an English paper, analyzing a short story or a book or novel, whatever it was, but it's really along the same lines of being able to, you know, look at all the pieces of information in front of you and evaluate and how are you creative in your problems? Can you think, you know, on your feet, but also just how you make judgment is such a big thing. So I love that because it doesn't have to be exactly in one defined way. So I think the pie metrics is probably really, really important for that. So what about back to the super day where you left off, are there specific ways to prepare for those super day interviews that someone can... for free possibly, you know, there's so many resources online. Is there anything you suggest? Yeah, so like the Super Day, people wanna just get a feel for you, right? They wanna understand how you interact with people. Are you engaging? Do you have, what we often say, do you have presence, right? And presence to me is, are you engaging? Is the conversation natural? It's funny, you know, when you sit down and you interview people, some people are really nervous and it's really awkward and unnatural. And some people just have a very natural way about them that puts the interviewer at ease. That crowd of people always impresses me. And I'm not the world's greatest interviewer, so I don't pretend to be an expert. But I've always been impressed with people who can be very natural, very engaging, very poised, very comfortable. in what is a pressure situation. Because when you're doing what we do, that's what you have to be when you're going out and you're talking to clients or even if you're talking to colleagues. We often get the question, if you come from a liberal arts school versus coming from Penn, where you may have majored in finance or whatever, are you at a disadvantage? The empirical data from what we have seen is that liberal arts majors, be it English or... political science or economics or whatever, do just as well, if not better, than finance or accounting majors. That said, when you go through the interview process, obviously I talked about the interpersonal part a few seconds ago, but the one thing that virtually every interviewer can really sink their teeth into when they... review the results and report back on an interview is how did that person do on the technical skills or the analytical side because that is a big part of what we do here. We analyze financial statements, we value companies, we do a lot of, like I said, basic math, but we do a lot of it and we apply it in a way that most liberal arts majors haven't applied it. come up to speed and I've always encouraged people. And I think there's a number of modules out there, but there's one that I think it's four or $500. So it's not free, but it's called training the street. And we, by the way, we have zero affiliation. This is just my own personal perspective. I'm not training the street for any other reason than that. But I think it's 12 modules or something. And it, It was developed, I believe, by someone who was an analyst and had been in the business and said, I'm going to develop a module or a series of modules to help people understand exactly what we do and how to do it. And you can get it online. And what I found is when those liberal arts majors go through it, They're materially better prepared than when they don't go through it. And when I say go through it, I interviewed one guy who I encouraged to take to, he was a, I think he might've been an English major, a history major. And I said, you really need to spend some time on this. And when I interviewed him, I was blown away at how fluent he was. And I said, did you do training the street? He said, I did it three times. you find is that when you're interviewing someone, it's really easy to pick up when somebody has memorized something versus having a general or a fluent understanding even if it's a, you know, obviously no one's expecting you to be an expert, but again, it's sort of, you just can pick up on it in two seconds. And so, The more you do it, the more you have a comfort level, the more you fumble through it and make mistakes and then learn from those mistakes, the more fluent you're gonna be in doing it. And I'm sympathetic to people who are liberal arts majors because it requires time to do it. It's a lot of work, but it pays off if you do the work. When I encourage people to do it, I would say, 20% of the people actually spend the time and 80% either scan it or, you know, don't do the proper amount of work on it. And it shows and you can pick up on it right away. I mean, I guess it's like anything that if you practice and you're prepared and, you know, having, find someone to practice with, maybe a classmate or a friend, or have a professor that might take a. a little time to, or a parent, anybody to practice quizzing yourself and speaking about it as well, I think is another part of that. And the other thing is when you go through this stuff, find somebody who knows what they're talking about in the industry. Most folks have friends that do this stuff or have gone through an analyst program and write down, you know, go through these modules, write down a list of 10 questions and you know. corner somebody. I spent time with somebody who's gonna be starting in investment banking shortly and was a liberal arts major. And I spent a couple hours just helping them understand the concepts. And it's really hard to understand them until you go hands-on in Excel and do a discounted cashflow analysis or an LBO analysis. You have... no idea what you don't know until you try to do it. And when you do it and you realize, oh, this is really much different than I thought, those mistakes and the fumbling through it and answer or asking people questions of things you don't know make a huge difference to your sort of fluency. Yeah, and back to your point of, you have to have a real authentic passion for... going into this business and it will show in along the way, it's going to show. And if you didn't take the time to repair properly, it will really come out at that point. I would think, I think people should have anywhere from five to 10 interviews, informational interviews, practice interviews, data collection, whatever they're doing with people in the industry for each interview, real interview, like at least five to 10. And I know that sounds like a lot, but what it will pay off, it'll pay off in spades. Yeah, I just you raise a really good point, which is I remember a story of when I was I was probably now an associate. So this was in the 90s. And I was working a lot of hours, like, you know, a lot. And I remember working every day for three months straight. And, you know, at the time, you know, investment banking pays well and you know, you can, you know, I was able to pay off student loans quickly and, and save a good amount of money. And that was, you know, I didn't come from a lot of money growing up. So that was a really positive thing for me. And I remember my roommate who was not in the banking business say to me, well, and again, I was an associate. It wasn't like I was a senior person, you know, I'd work those kinds of hours. if I can make that kind of money too. And I said, no, you wouldn't because if you're not really interested in it and really intellectually curious in this world, in the finance world and learning about companies in different industries and, you know, advising companies and just generally intellectually curious about it, there's no amount of money that you can make that can make you happy about working the amount of hours that often are required, not always. But you'll have weeks where you wanna work 80, 90 hours a week, you gotta do the math on what 80, 90 hours a week is, right? It's a lot and it's not a lot of sleep. And we're, as a firm, we're working on trying to make sure we have the appropriate work-life balance for all of our... young people, but this is an industry-wide thing. Like, you know, that's, you know, if you're getting into this, you know that there's a lot of hours associated with it. And if you're not intellectually curious about it or really interested in it, find something you are and go after that because it'll be a really tough two years. You'll be miserable if you're not truly interested in it. It's great experience. And I've always said, like, going to business school after doing this must be pretty easy, because I went to business school before I went into banking. And all the stuff I learned was like, I was a pro at it after two years of working in this business. So. If you're not really interested in it, find that thing you are really interested in because I can tell you, you won't be a happy person spending 80, 90 hours a week and not really being interested in what you're doing. Yeah, yeah, you gotta be, you have to be. And so on that note, like the big summer that these undergrads get this internship, is the summer going into senior year. How important is it to have something banking, finance, business type of internship during your sophomore summer? So what you do the summer after freshman year and then summer after sophomore year, how much do you think that has an impact on that application, that initial application that you put in? Does it matter? I think it used to matter a little bit more because all we did was review resumes. And now we go through a pie metrics process and a higher view process. And if you score well on those, it doesn't start to matter until later in the, in the interview process, as opposed to the screening process, right? You switched our processes. Other firms, I think still do it, um, you know, in the, in the way we used to do it. And so I think having something. It doesn't have to be a full summer. It could be two weeks. It could be, you know, you know, people often do investment clubs at school or something to show that you're doing something to progress yourself and prepare yourself to do this. It doesn't even have to be at a bank or at a, you know, investment firm or a hedge fund or whatever, just anything, just to show that you're interested and you're keeping active and you weren't going home and just going out every night. Right. You can still go out, but it's so true. I mean, I'm constantly, the young people, especially the undergrads that are just freshmen and sophomore that I work with, I, you know, the first thing I look at on their resume to see, or not the first, maybe, but pretty close is what are they, what are they doing? What have they gotten involved in at school? Even if they play a sport, like find a women in business club or, you know, the young accountants or young men in finance. So they have all these names, you know, find something that will, um, show that you really are, you're, you're passionate. And, and, you know, if you're, if you're not, even if you're not sure. If this is the path for you, I think it's a good way to learn. You'll have speaker series, you'll have maybe projects to work on. And yes, it's gonna be more time, but most, even if you have a part-time job at school, whatever it is, there's usually something you can get involved in at school that will get you, like you said, to indicate and point that, yes, I'm raising my hand, I'm in, I'm into this. When you do, whatever that thing is you do, remember somebody's gonna ask a question about it. I told my daughter who did a one week internship this summer, just and it was sort of in the finance world. I'm like, you may not have understood a lot of what you did, but register in your brain something that you took away from it. Because someone's going to ask a question. And if you just block what you did out of your brain, then it sort of diminishes. the benefit of having it on your resume. So have a few things, a challenge you had to deal with or what you took away from it, or if you worked on a project, what was an interesting takeaway from it? Something that you can speak to because someone's likely to ask a question about it. And I think it's important. And I think the other thing is, when people are looking at a resume and they're trying to sort of size you up and say, what is the story behind this person? And sometimes that story isn't, look at how wonderful all these internships are. Sometimes it's, I really like this person because they've worked their butt off, whether it's, you know, holding down two jobs or, you know, whatever it is. You know, we often latch on to people who don't have a lot of great internship experience, but work two jobs at school because they're trying to trying to pay for things and you know that says something about the person. That's part of why I got my job at JP Morgan 30 years ago. I worked, played two sports and worked two jobs and people are like, wow, how'd you do all that? And what I said to them I remember I had a really tough interview question, which was a person said to me, it was my last interview, and they said, well, we're interviewing 30, 40 people, what makes you any better than the rest of them? And I said, well, I don't know, but I played two sports and I worked two jobs, and if you have anybody else that manages their time, as well as I do and still have a reasonably good GPA, if they're doing that better than me, then I guess maybe they should get it. But I don't know that you're gonna be interviewing people that have had to do as much as I have and yet still be successful in school. And I knew I nailed it because the guy was like sort of speechless. He was like, yeah, I think you're right. I don't think I have. I didn't have any internships. I was, you know. washing dishes at a fraternity and monitoring the weight room and you know, just doing things to, you know, have some spending money and to help pay for school. Um, but it was part of my story. That's what it is. You have to know your story. And I think back, I don't want to forget to say this, that any internship shadow day, it could be one day that you have, whatever it is, micro internship, you know, bagging groceries at the grocery store, whatever it is that you're doing every day or once a week, have a place where you write down notes about experiences or people that you meet or something. So you can then weave that into an interview answer and just talk about that becomes who you are those experiences. And if you are in an internship or a shadow day or a micro experience, make sure you take that moment to reach out and connect or introduce yourself to any person you could possibly find at that company, whether it's via LinkedIn, a coffee chat, anything. Because that's the other thing people get in their little tunnel and they forget to use that moment to connect with people. I love that answer, though. I think it's true. Listen, you know what? I'm hardworking, and this is a hardworking business. It was, again, this was in 1989. But the second to last interview I had, to get into this program I was in, I had to get into NYU to get my master's in accounting degree. And I was. The interviewing process was much later than it is now. So this was March of my senior year for a full-time position. And she asked me, I played lacrosse, and she asked me, have you taken the GMATs? And I said, no, I haven't. She said, well, no problem. You can take them in two weeks. It's Saturday and it's the last time you can take them before June or whenever the program started. And I sort of did the math in my head and I'm like, yeah, I can't do that. And she looked at me like, what do you mean? And I said, well, you know, you see on my resume, I play lacrosse. I like to think I'm an important part of the team. And we played North Carolina that day. It's probably one of the biggest games of the year. And I'm not just going to not show up and, you know, not, you know, let my teammates down and not play. So if I don't get the job, I guess I don't get the job, but I'm not, I can't take them, then I'm not going to do it. And so we had this like awkward. hearing at each other. And, you know, it ended. And when I left the interview, I remember calling home to my parents and both my mom and dad get on the phone. And my mom was like, why did you do that? And my dad was like, of course you're gonna play. Like, you know, that was how my mindset, I'm not saying that was the right answer, but the point of this is when I arrived and we had our welcoming uh, reception at JP Morgan, the person who I had that exchange with was there. And she sort of, sort of laughed as I went up to say hello to her. And she said, one of the reasons you got the job was because of your answer to that question, which was you willing to not get the job because of your, because of your, um, your teammates and not letting your teammates down and, um, you know, if ever there was a indication that someone was a team oriented person. It was to not actually get the job because you would have been letting another group of teammates down. So that's a great story. Eric, I love that. That's you know what? I hope you won that game. I wouldn't. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anybody that's listening and interviewing, but it was a good indication of something anyway. So all right. Well, this is great. Any last thoughts or anything else to add for these folks? No, I think the only thing I would say is don't let the process intimidate you. Every single person you're interviewing with, I've come across thousands of people who have over my time that have come through this process. Everybody has a flaw. And everybody, most people have multiple flaws. And so I think. When young people go through this, they're super intimidated because this has, investment banking has a reputation of people are super smart and they're this and they're that, and they're, they know everything and I know nothing. And don't let the process, don't let the people intimidate you. Everybody... I keep telling people and I reference back to what I said before, you just have to be smart enough and you have to be really interested. If you're both of those things and you do the work to prepare, you're going to be fine. Confidence is a really important thing. If you have those two things and if you've done the work, you're going to be confident and therefore you're going to be more comfortable and more engaging and personable in the interview. Yeah, that's great. And I'll just add, don't put all your eggs in one basket. You know, I think that happens too often is, you know, people get stuck on brand names and be in it for the long haul, not just for this first job. Yeah. If you're, if you're, if you're talented or, or particularly cut out for something, people will find you, you'll do well enough. Even if you're not at a, at a big brand name firm and you do a good job, there's always opportunity to. to switch and to go to a better brand name if you've done well and worked hard. And that's really what it comes down to. Do you, are you an honest person? Do you work hard? Are you smart enough? And you know, you're gonna be just fine regardless of where you start out. Yep, I love it. I love it. Awesome. Eric, thank you so much. This is great. I really appreciate the time. You're very welcome. If you need me to answer anything else, let me know. Launch Career Strategies helps young professionals launch into a successful and fulfilling career path. Check us out at launchcareerstrategies.com. By the way, if you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a rating and a review. Reviews are key to helping spread the word about Top of the Pile, so it can reach other young professionals or anyone looking for advice on how to up their career game. Thanks for listening. I hope you have or are having an awesome week. I hope to connect with you next week on Top of the Pile. Thanks.