Investment Banking

Hi, I've moved your thread to the finance, investment banking and accountancy forum.

I don't think there are any apprenticeships (degree or otherwise) in the actual investment banking part of major banks.

Your only real option is uni, and to go to a target uni for investment banks (which are pretty much the ones you think they are). However they don't really care what subject you study for the general analyst roles I gather so if your personal passion is learning about vikings and reading Beowulf, you can just as well do a degree in ASNAC or Viking and Old Norse Studies and go into investment banking as someone who did economics.

If you wanted to do quant finance though then you'd realistically probably need to be aiming for a PhD in maths, CS, or maybe physics or engineering after doing a similar undergrad, most likely all at a target uni.

I really know nothing about UK universities. Could you possibly suggest a (target uni)? as their is so much disagreement and i want to know from a credible source. My a level results are not good enough for Cambridge, oxford but are for UCL, would that be a good uni?

The target unis are pretty widely considered to include Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Imperial, LSE, and Warwick (perhaps only specific departments there e.g. maths, the business school, economics, CS). Others may or may not be included by some peoples' reckoning but those are fairly safe bets I would expect.

I'd also note that plenty of UCL (and LSE) courses have the same or sometimes higher entry criteria than Oxford or Cambridge do in general. The standard offer for Oxford "arts" subjects is AAA typically - plenty of UCL courses are above that. If you are below that then with AAB or lower there are far fewer courses at UCL (or LSE) that you would be able to consider.

Also even if the entry criteria are lower in terms of grades, that doesn't mean the course will be any easier to get into. There are a number of courses at LSE with a given entry requirement of e.g. AAA or A*AA which have very low success rates for applicants (even lower than equivalent subjects at Oxford or Cambridge - for example law at LSE is usually statistically more competitive than either Oxford or Cambridge).

Worth bearing in mind quite a few investment banking grad schemes require AAB (and you will just get sifted out if you don't have that for those ones).

hey,

I want to get into investment banking and I’m trying to pick between Edinburgh and Strathclyde for my university next year. Both courses are pretty similar (economics and finance) and I am struggling to pick between the two. I prefer the location of Strathclyde and the student life there however the prestige of Edinburgh and it being a Russell Group university is tempting me there. I have heard investment banks tend to only pick graduates from feeder universities or Russell Group unis; is there truth to this and if my chances of entry into the sector significantly change between the two universities? Do you know anything of the employability coming out of either