Investment Banking Associate (New York)

Arrive at the office, grab breakfast, go through email and voicemail and start reading up on the latest industry news.

Receive the latest mark-up of a presentation to be delivered to a private equity sponsor later this afternoon. Discuss changes to be made with the rest of the team and start processing the comments.

Establish the outline of a strategy presentation we intend to present to a major U.S. forestry company. Discuss upcoming tasks with the analyst and sit down with senior bankers to formulate ideas and recommendations.

Grab a sandwich from downstairs and start preparing for the conference call we have with the private equity sponsor on possible investment opportunities.

Meet with the Debt Capital Markets Group and the Loan Sales and Trading professionals to discuss financing opportunities for a client that needs to raise funds in order to acquire one of its competitors.

Switch back to the strategic review presentation and discuss some of the issues that we discovered with the VP in the group. We discovered an interesting M&A opportunity and bring it to the attention of our Managing Director.

Conference call with the M&A team in Toronto to get their feel on our proposal and formulate the idea to be presented to the client. Our Managing Director wants to see a combination analysis and wants a first draft in the morning.

Order in dinner and switch gears a little to work on an assignment a client asked for earlier in the afternoon. I fine-tune the valuation analysis the analyst prepared earlier and draft a response to the CFO.

I review the strategy presentation, double check the numbers and the outcome of the combination analysis. I believe we should be in good shape to discuss next steps in the morning.

Check emails and respond to messages I could not get to throughout the day. Check the schedule for tomorrow and touch base with the others in the team. If there is nothing else, I call it the day. A very busy but rewarding day.