r/financestudents

I've been through five analyst classes now. Interviewed hundreds, hired dozens, watched some become stars and others leave after 12 months wondering what happened. The advice on this sub is almost entirely about getting the offer. Almost none of it covers what actually matters once you start.

You will spend more time on PowerPoint than Excel.

Every incoming analyst thinks the job is financial modelling. It's not. Pitch books, management presentations, and process documents are all PowerPoint. The analysts who accept this quickly and learn to tell a clear story in slides progress faster than the ones who resent it. Clear communication is how deals get done. The model is the engine — the slides are what the client sees.

The hours are real, but the distribution matters more than the average.

Most weeks are 70-80 hours. That's long but manageable. A significant minority are 85-100+ when a live deal is running. And occasionally there's a dead week where the whole floor leaves at 7pm.

What I notice: the analysts who struggle aren't the ones who work the most hours. They're the ones who can't switch off during downtime. They sit at their desk during a slow Tuesday evening refreshing their inbox instead of going to the gym. Then when the next live deal hits, they're already running on empty.

Technical skills stop differentiating you about three months in.

By the time you start, every analyst in the class can build a DCF. I don't care about that. What I care about:

• Reliability. If I send you something at 10pm, can I go to sleep knowing it'll be done correctly by morning? Or do I need to check on you at midnight? The analysts I trust get the best deals. The ones I have to babysit get whatever's left.
• Attention to detail. A misplaced decimal in a client presentation destroys trust — not just yours, mine. I presented your work to the client. If it's wrong, I look bad. Print your work before you send it. Errors jump off paper in a way they don't on screen.
• Flagging problems early. The worst thing an analyst can do is sit on a problem for six hours hoping it resolves itself. If something is wrong, tell me now. I can fix a problem at 4pm. I cannot fix it at midnight when the client needs it at 8am.

Your relationship with your staffer controls your life.

The staffer assigns you to deals. I've watched analysts with identical technical ability have completely different experiences because one had a good relationship with the staffer and the other didn't. Be reliable with the staffer, communicate proactively, and never complain about a staffing decision to anyone except them directly.

Politics determines roughly half your ranking.

I sit in the calibration meetings. Annual reviews are set by 5-8 senior people who spend less than five minutes discussing each analyst. If multiple people in the room know your name and say something positive, you're top bucket. If nobody can remember what you worked on, you're middle of the pack regardless of how hard you actually worked. Visibility matters. Get on deals where senior people see your output.

The financial advice I give every incoming class.

Live on your base salary. Bank your entire bonus. At a BB in London the base is roughly £75-80K — that's a comfortable life. The bonus goes straight to savings. I've watched analysts leave after two years with genuine financial independence, and I've watched others leave with almost nothing because they upgraded their flat, their wardrobe, and their holidays to match their total comp. The ones who banked their bonuses have options. The ones who didn't are trapped.

One thing that might reassure you.

In five analyst classes, I have never seen someone fired purely for performance. The ones who get managed out are careless repeatedly, aren't culture fits, AND it coincides with a downturn that gives the firm cover. Do solid work, be someone people want on their team at 2am, and you'll be fine.

Happy to answer questions here or via DM. Can also share some interview resources.

I have been invited to an amplifyme event at Goldman Sachs - their 'Dive into Markets Stream of the Goldman Sachs x AmplifyME Experience'. From what I have gathered in this simulation you spend half the time as an IB market maker and half the time as an asset manager with top performers earning fastracks for internships opportunities. Does anyone have any advice on how to perform best?

La-Z-Boy has been transitioning for years from a pure wholesale manufacturer into a company that increasingly controls its own retail stores. The core idea is simple: when you own the store, you capture both the manufacturing margin and the retail margin on the same sale. That is structurally higher earnings power than the legacy model, and consensus is not pricing it that way.

The company has been converting franchisee-operated locations into company-owned stores in key markets. What that does is swap lumpy, volume-dependent wholesale revenue for more predictable retail traffic with higher gross margins. You also get real-time customer data that feeds back into design and inventory — a compounding operational advantage that pure wholesalers do not have.

The macro setup adds some optionality. Housing turnover is near multi-decade lows, which hurts the entire furniture category. But La-Z-Boy is not competing in the commodity segment. When rates normalize and housing inventory unlocks, the pent-up replacement demand hits a company with a structurally better margin structure than the one it had heading into the last housing boom.

The balance sheet is clean — no meaningful debt — and management has been returning capital via buybacks and dividends while simultaneously funding the store buildout. That combination does not happen at companies with broken underlying economics.

Valuation: roughly 10-11x earnings, which is roughly where it traded before the retail transformation started generating real returns. The market is still pricing the old wholesale story. The actual business has been converging toward something with better returns on capital for a few years now, quietly.

Not a high-growth name. But as a value setup on an overlooked consumer brand actively improving its own economics, it deserves more attention than it gets.

AECOM is one of those names that gets lumped in with cyclical project contractors when the reality is a lot more durable than that. The backlog is at record levels, which means the revenue pipeline for the next few years is effectively locked in regardless of what macro does in the short term.

The part consensus keeps missing is the margin story. AECOM has been aggressively winding down its lower-margin, risk-heavy construction businesses and pivoting toward a pure advisory and program management model. That shift is still playing out, and the margin expansion it implies is not fully reflected in where the stock trades.

On top of that, the firm has been deploying AI tools internally for project management and estimation. That is not a marketing story — it directly reduces the headcount intensity of winning and managing large government infrastructure contracts. If you hold margins flat from here you miss the whole thesis. Model what the mix shift does over two or three years and the stock looks materially cheap.

Government infrastructure spend is also one of the few pockets of demand that does not disappear in a tariff-driven slowdown. These are multi-year programs with committed budgets. That gives AECOM a different risk profile than the market is currently pricing in.

This re-rates when the backlog converts and margins tick higher. Not a near-term trade, but the setup is genuinely underappreciated right now.

I want to learn how to use programs like excel, database systems, e-commerce, ethics and security, computer systems, hardware systems, networking,etc. My college offers a course to learn these things, but would it be better and would companies prefer if i learn it through linkedin learning or coursera instead??