>The banks care less about their qualifications than their work ethic. Being a Rhodes Scholar doesn't make much of a difference when you're a young banker. More of it is being willing to stay at the office for 120 hours a week.
This is very, very true. In my experience, investment banking is by no means a particularly difficult thing to do, given enough capital to play around with. Quants aside, the concepts that are used (take, for example, "mezzanine capital") are mostly buzzwords used to give a professional air to really very simple processes/ideas. It is a far cry from the serious, dedicated abstract thought demanded by fields such as software engineering/machine learning/data science etc.
However, what large financial institutions need are people who are extremely assiduous to small details, have a work ethic in which 7am-11pm hours creating powerpoints are no big deal (and have good sounding qualifications to impress investors).
This is very, very true. In my experience, investment banking is by no means a particularly difficult thing to do, given enough capital to play around with. Quants aside, the concepts that are used (take, for example, "mezzanine capital") are mostly buzzwords used to give a professional air to really very simple processes/ideas. It is a far cry from the serious, dedicated abstract thought demanded by fields such as software engineering/machine learning/data science etc.
However, what large financial institutions need are people who are extremely assiduous to small details, have a work ethic in which 7am-11pm hours creating powerpoints are no big deal (and have good sounding qualifications to impress investors).