It’s 8 p.m. on a Wednesday evening, and suited silhouettes scurry out of Ida Noyes Hall after a seemingly long “Night on Wall Street.” The annual event, hosted by Career Advancement, allows select students the chance to exchange conversation and résumés with recruiters, giving them a glimpse into a career that looms large in UChicago’s professional imagination.
Recruiting—the months-long ritual of networking, interviewing, and studying for technical assessments to secure a coveted third-year internship—is a rite of passage for finance prospectives. It’s framed less as a process imposed on students and more as one they must actively undertake. Suit jackets hang from the backs of lecture hall seats. Seated in the corner of Bartlett Dining Commons, a student, in hushed whispers, walks me through a discounted cash-flow model like it is a secret passageway. Another student rushes out of Saieh Hall with wired earphones in, not listening to music, but taking a networking call as he crosses the quad.
However, it is not the firms who recruit students so much as the students who self-recruit, competing for a small number of openings. According to Extern, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and J. P. Morgan had acceptance rates below 1 percent in the 2026 application cycle.
35 percent of the UChicago Class of 2025 entering the workforce chose the financial services industry, making it the most popular post-graduation industry, according to data from Career Advancement. This is an increase from the Class of 2024, of which 32 percent entered finance. It is also comparable to peer institutions considered more “preprofessional,” like the University of Pennsylvania, where 34 percent of graduating fourth-years in 2024 began work in financial services.
So what’s the appeal to finance that makes UChicago students willing to endure such a competitive process?
The Allure of Finance
For Hetav Mehta, a second-year currently going through recruitment for investment banking, the appeal of the field is its fast-paced environment and real-world relevance: “I came to UChicago because I wanted to do econ[omics] and math academia or something, especially when I applied. But when I looked into math academia, I realized that I couldn’t make a tangible impact with my research—it would take too much time. With investment banking, you get that outcome outright, and you get promoted for it.” As an investment banking analyst, Mehta could be staffed on projects or “deals,” which can materialize into real-life company mergers or public offerings in as little as three months.
Second-year Zander Lee took a liking to “quant” finance—a specialized branch which applies sophisticated mathematical models to the field of finance. “I thought I was pretty good at math. So, I came here assuming that I was a math major,” he said. “And a lot of my friends that I made early on were also math majors, and they were all interested in quant finance.”
S. (A.B. ’24)—who requested anonymity, citing a strict workplace policy—works as an investment banking analyst at a bulge bracket bank. She remembers the recruiting process very well. S. knew she was leaning toward business starting in her first year, so she followed the advice of her seniors in finance clubs and set out on a path that led her to investment banking. In her circles, it was considered a prestigious entry-level job that could advance her career trajectory.
S. specified how the rigorous and technical nature of the training shapes its prestige, “so whatever career you choose after, it opens up a lot of different paths.” Many choose to remain in the financial services industry in higher paying roles (private equity and asset management are considered common “exit paths”) or choose to pivot into entirely new fields such as product management or entrepreneurship.
But she points to another important ingredient in its prestige: exclusivity. “Just because of the sheer number of people that are interested in investment banking versus how many slots there are, I feel like that is probably a reason why people think it is prestigious.”
Compensation, unsurprisingly, plays a central role in finance’s allure. New graduates in entry-level positions can earn six-figure incomes, typically from $100,000 to $200,000. “Of course [pay] was a factor,” Lee said when asked about his interest in finance as a post-graduation career. “Anybody who says it’s not a factor at all is lying to you.”
“I’m at UChicago. Clearly, I Have Some Grind Tolerance.”
The high pay, however, comes at a cost. Investment banking is notorious for its demanding hours, with estimates ranging from 60–80 hours per week, even climbing to 100 during busy deal cycles. While the reality is hardly unknown to UChicago students, S. highlighted that the strain is not merely the length of the workday, but its unpredictability. On some days, she is done with work at 4:30 p.m., “and then I don’t get my next round of work until 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. and I don’t necessarily expect when I’m going to get work, so that can be pretty challenging,” she said. “Clients can ask for things with a one-day turnaround.” This time pressure creates stress throughout the chain of command. “If your client has a crazy deadline, it puts a bunch of crazy deadlines internally as well.”
Still, for many students, the tradeoff seems fair. “I never really considered it to be a major, major issue. The work–life balance [in quantitative finance] isn’t as bad as working in other areas of finance. The work seems pretty interesting,” Lee said. “I’m at UChicago. Clearly, I have some grind tolerance.”
Assessing the Business Economics Major’s Return on Investment
The nexus between the rise in preprofessional culture at the University, the creation of the business economics track of the economics major, and the track’s increasing popularity among undergraduates is not new campus discourse. Career preparation is a central part of the underlying philosophy of the business economics track; the Department of Economics website highlights how the curriculum is something students “will find useful in carrying out their day-to-day tasks.”
However, for S., the purported credential signaling of the business economics track does not translate into preparedness for work. “It’s good to take classes like accounting and corporate finance. It gives you a glimpse into some of the things you might do, but I don’t think any class really has translated to what I do day-to-day. Everything I’ve learned is on the job,” she said.
As an analyst, some of the tasks S. must perform include reading through hundreds of pages of filings or equity research reports to find specific estimate numbers; making presentations, reports, or “pitch books” summarizing industry trends; or even presenting new investment opportunities to clients on “marketing meetings.” More than specialized finance knowledge or market intuition, she stressed the value of learning how to produce polished written work like essays, papers, and memos, since this translates directly into making client-ready deliverables at work.
That is not to say that a preprofessional major does not have benefits. Business economics is touted as more forgiving on students’ GPAs, which are one of the most consequential recruiting metrics, according to alumni. S., who completed the standard track of the economics major paired with Booth School of Business classes, contrasted her experience to that of peers who graduated from schools with dedicated finance tracks. “They have an upper hand initially.”
She added that students from those programs may know specific accounting rules or specific financial modeling techniques that S., as a UChicago economics student, said she was not prepared for. But these initial advantages dissipate quickly. “There’s a bigger learning curve in the first six to eight months. But after that, I do think what UChicago really prepares you for is looking at the bigger picture, which is also important as an analyst.”
Finance Careers and Intellectualism Are Not Inherent Antagonists
According to S., UChicago’s academic culture, particularly the Core Curriculum, worked synergistically with the demands of her job. “UChicago prepares you well for the broader picture—things that other people struggle with. It’s harder to get these soft skills unless you [have taken] all of these Core classes that we got to take, or [to] be thinking very critically.” Her advice to students is straightforward: take classes out of genuine interest, “because those skills are more useful in the job than taking preprofessional-type classes.” S. believes that the Core, which enables students to think both abstractly and practically, synthesize dense material into theses, read closely, and work under time constraints, develops skills that are more transferable to finance than one might imagine.
At UChicago, the history of finance as a discipline is intertwined with academic tradition, thriving because of the University’s emphasis on intellectualism rather than in spite of it. In an essay titled “A Brief History of Finance and My Life at UChicago,” Eugene Fama, hailed the “father of modern finance,” writes: “Finance has its birth in 1952 with the PhD thesis of Harry Markowitz on portfolio theory, that he did in the [UChicago] Department of Economics.” In his time, he says, UChicago, the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University “were [the] only three serious finance groups [of faculty] in the world.”
With this legacy, it is not surprising that UChicago is considered a “target school” for many top banks. A study using public LinkedIn data ranks UChicago at sixth place for top feeder schools for investment banking when adjusting for undergraduate class size. According to popular finance forums like Wall Street Oasis, intelligence and work ethic are treated as “givens” for UChicago students. As one contributor on the forum put it, all a UChicago student must prove is that they’re “socially competent and someone that other people will want to be around 16 hours a day.”
Mehta, too, believes the caricatures of the “finance bro” and the corresponding label of “anti-intellectual” are misrepresentative. He described the cerebral energy of one of the finance RSOs he is a part of: “We really emphasize intellectualism, where you’re constantly researching, you’re finding contrarian views, [and] you’re pitching stocks and different ideas.”
Lee had a similar experience with RSO culture. “I found that the interview questions that clubs would ask turned out to be pretty interesting, like brain teaser–wise,” Lee said, adding that “it seemed intellectually pretty engaging and kind of up my alley.”
Technical interviews for quantitative trading are known for being rigorous, often including probability puzzles, betting games like poker, and quick-fire mental math questions to test mathematical logical thinking under time pressure. Since some trading roles require developing models to execute trades at high speeds, technical interviews also test candidates through timed “trading simulations,” requiring them to estimate the expected value of a game or design a coin toss with bid and ask prices. According to Lee, it was this challenge that drew him to quantitative finance in the first place.
If anything, both Mehta and S. suggested that the tension between intellectualism and the pursuit of these careers does not arise from finance itself, but the architecture of the recruiting process. The parallel curriculum of finance recruiting rewards formulaic rehearsal and fluency over creativity, and preparing for it demands developing a strong grasp on accounting principles, memorizing “good” answers, and practicing one’s delivery in a way that comes off as confident and self-assured. “Everyone’s really nerdy about the finance stuff,” Mehta said. “I guess conventional recruiting takes away from it.”
So What Is Crowding Out “the Life of the Mind”?
The preprofessional culture that comes with finance, for many students, is more of a response to the hefty demands of recruiting than a true reflection of their approach to education. The compressed and unforgiving process rewards early and sustained preparation, which eats away at time that could be spent on classes. “The competition is so intense—sometimes you have to recognize the opportunity cost and focus purely on recruiting, and I’m not very happy [about] that,” Mehta said.
Early timelines are fundamentally difficult to reconcile with intellectual exploration when career certainty is demanded so early. The shift reportedly began in 2015, when the staring timeline for financial services moved from fourth-year toward third-year fall. In 2017, it fell toward the summer before junior year, and in 2018 it was pushed to the spring of sophomore year. According to one Yale University investment banking recruiter, the rationale for doing so is to beat other banks in the race to recruit the best talent.
With less time to wander academically, the space for experimentation begins to narrow.
S., recalling her second-year fall, echoed the sentiment. “My classes were kind of my second priority. I wasn’t doing much socially or in clubs that weren’t finance-focused.” Students don’t necessarily pride themselves on being preprofessional but acquiesce to the system’s logic to optimize for the tight recruitment window. To complement technical interview preparation, “people end up taking classes like corporate finance and accounting,” S. said. “And then your GPA also matters, so people will take classes that they consider to be easier to get a certain grade.”
In finance lexicon, a “Superday” denotes the grueling final round of interviews in the banking recruitment process (often six to eight hours of back-to-back case, technical, and behavioral interviews, along with problem-solving assessments, designed to test performance under pressure). For each bank, students must also demonstrate deep knowledge about its recent deals, favored industries, and broader investing philosophy. Preparation becomes totalizing; it is no surprise that, in the days leading up to a “Superday,” students withdraw from public and academic life to concentrate on preparation for the high-stakes event.
It is true that early recruitment has undeniable perks: “I remember signing my summer offer and feeling such a sigh of relief because you almost kind of have a job lined up after college as a sophomore, which is insane to think about,” S. said.
But, as timelines inch increasingly closer to the start of the undergraduate education, S. worries that the recruiting logic no longer remains a transient, situational adaptation. “When I first joined UChicago, I met a bunch of seniors that were really doing classes out of passion. There was definitely a larger group of students going into academia, exploring classes out of interest rather than to meet a certain job requirement.” Students now have fundamentally different priorities, she says.
When S. returned to campus to host informational sessions, she also noted that some students had started career planning as early as high school. They had completed serious internships even before they began college, which was not the case when she had joined UChicago. “There’s definitely a rise in the number of students that want to do [investment banking], but also [in the] preparation [of those students],” she said.
For Mehta, commitment should not precede self-discovery. He believes preprofessional culture is an unhealthy mindset “for the people who are doing finance just for the lucrative, monetary benefit” while remaining uncertain about their interests. “I genuinely like investing. At the end of the day, what are you doing? You’re disagreeing with the market. I like to do that—that’s something I enjoy.”
But he’s also seen peers get pulled into the career by momentum rather than curiosity, constantly worrying that they are not doing enough to secure a job.“What does a 19-year-old even know? You’ve barely taken Core classes; you’ve barely gotten enough time to prepare your stock pitches or understand finance,” he said. S. agreed: “It’s absurd how early recruiting is.”
The summer before his first year, Lee attended the New York Career Exploration Week in Finance—a four-day visit to industry offices for incoming first-years organized by Career Advancement—to test whether the career was for him. “I get there. Everybody is already [business economics]. They know. They already know they want to work in investment banking…. They really have it all seemingly figured out. And I come here and club applications start immediately.” The pace was not what he expected at UChicago. “It just seems opposite to the core values,” Lee said.
Can Intellectualism Be Postponed?
Many students worry about the all-consuming role that the recruiting process has come to play in the undergraduate experience.
But S. hopes prospective finance professionals can recover some of the curiosity displaced during recruiting later in their undergraduate degrees. “I took [classes like] South Asian Sensorium, Black Panther Party, South Asian Music, and, looking back, those are the classes I talk about the most with my seniors when we’re sitting at lunch… [and that] I can actually apply in my conversations with a client. I’m not thinking about my accounting class as much.” It is not purely the soft skills, but the contents of these classes that have contributed unexpectedly to her job.
Yet, postponing intellectualism to students’ third or fourth year is easier said than done. Recruiting often behaves like a sunk cost, continuing to demand time from upperclassmen due to competitive return offers and RSO obligations. Preprofessional RSOs function as both a symptom and catalyst of the pervasive, prolonged culture. “The asks for a lot of the clubs keeps increasing,” Mehta said. “And there’s so much hype around club recruitment in the fall of your freshman year.”
Preprofessional RSOs are central to the recruitment process, and their role extends beyond community-building; they take it upon themselves to teach the vocabulary and grammar of professional life early on through coffee chats, multistage interviews, and alumni networks. The process is rather ambiguous to outsiders, so advice usually circulates through informal channels, with finance-oriented upperclassmen mentoring second- and third-years.
In a college without a finance major, clubs do the heavy lifting in terms of career preparation and education, but they also create social bubbles that persist even after recruitment. “When you’re in these preprofessional pipelines, you get siloed into these careers, and there’s a lot of opportunity out there that is often unexplored,” S. said. The result is a closed ecosystem where recruiting logic continues to surround students, leaving little room for independent curiosity to reemerge.
For this reason, S. urged students to “think other options through before you fully commit to investment banking.” Two years as an analyst is a big commitment, she said; even if it feels counterproductive, students need to actively make time to explore other curiosities.
“When this [recruiting] gets over, I kind of want to focus again on my classes, take harder classes, explore economics more,” Mehta said. Lee, on the other hand, has been enjoying Classics of Social and Political Thought, his social sciences Core sequence and hopes to take more “random” classes later.
“At some point, I want to take a linguistics class. If I was here just for learning, I’d probably major in linguistics. I’ve always found it interesting.”
