Vantaggi
6-week summer training in Philly--all expenses paid (other than food) hotel living, amazing opportunity to make new friends and network (worth doing the interviews just to stay only for the training program) Mentorship--available for everyone, open door policy Career opportunities--the vast majority of analysts quit within 2 years to move onto public finance branches of big-name investment banks Learning opportunities--unless you specifically took public finance or public government courses in college, chances are everything you learn will be new. The level of sophistication in financial modelling was definitely noteworthy.
Svantaggi
Training--extremely wasteful. After researching hotel rates, I calculated over $5,000 spent per person for the 6-week training and 1-month relocation benefit. Why couldn't this money be put towards my noncompetitive salary? Pay--industry (public finance) is known for low pay, but the amount of talent I saw in my peers (and myself) is much too valuable for this amount of pay (sub-$50K base salary, $53-55K after COLA). It obviously increases with seniority, but still remains noncompetitive. Relationship with managers--almost nonexistent if you do not engage yourself. While I accept that managers are busy, they make very little effort to get to know analysts unless you directly report to or engage in conversation with them. Day-to-day job responsibilities: work distribution is very unbalanced--for days, I would have nothing to do while my colleague would have to stay past 6 to finish. Models that we learn to use in training, although great to learn for the building blocks, went virtually unused in daily work. Models that we use day-to-day are almost completely automated and require mostly grunt work to copy-paste. Managers--generally quite nice, but those in charge of new hires all seem to be ex-bankers who not-so-gently enforce expectations that, arguably, do not fit within the context of public finance advisory.