Credit Suisse First Boston second round, interview 2
(one on one)
Why IBD? Why not management consulting?
Numbers (ie valuation), creativity, big deals. Merrill Lynch guy came to Imperial to give a talk and described IBers as proactive, consultants as reactive. IBers come in and stick together or break apart firms. Consultants clean up the mess afterwards
Consultants do valuation too you know...
[should maybe have said that pitching, which appeals to my competitive nature, and the rewarding nature of deals, cannot be found so abundantly in consulting work]
*hands me a coffee coaster*
How many of these could I fit in this room?
Guesstimated size of room in feet, corrected myself to metres. Found volume. Divided this by guestimated volume of coaster as a cube (it was the shape of a slice of a cylinder).
How many if you crushed them?
20-30% more?
Calculate it properly
Should I find the difference in volume?
No, easier to recalculate the volume
[I had rounded my answer before and this time I rounded it again to make calculations easier. This severely broke my answer I realised afterwards, since we were only dealing with a difference of a few tens of percent, and my rounding was more significant than this. He didn't mention anything - I'm not even certain he noticed/cared.]
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