Newcomers put in 80 to 100 hours per week of grunt research work before they can consider moving up the ranks. Even in the higher echelons, in the oak-paneled corner offices, it's not all limousines and handshakes. Unlike CEOs like Disney's Michael Eisner or Virgin Atlantic's Richard Branson, investment bankers don't make big headlines. Investment bankers engineer mergers, take companies through the process of issuing stocks and bonds, finance new businesses and manage many of the complicated deals that mold the world's economic playing field. Some of the more-notable East Coast investment banks are Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Bear Stearns, Chase Manhattan and a host of others.
Investment banking is a job that, coming out of college, is just unparalleled.
But these local firms take on only a small fraction of the business h andled by their coastal counterparts, which is part of the problem for Carlson school graduates. Although Nelson noted that the finance program has placed a number of graduates in investment banking jobs, he said most of these firms in the Twin Cities are small, low-profile firms. Nelson said that in order for a student with a bachelor's degree to break into the field, they need to be very aggressive in their job search and exhaust every route of entry. Matt Kolling did just that. Kolling, a 1999 Carlson school graduate, didn't go for a job in Minneapolis, but went straight for the big-time job at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in New York.