Comment: Debunking the myth of the clones

Senior bankers descend on Oxford, Edinburgh, Cambridge and other UK university towns to fly the company flag.

Legions of human resources staff operate from stalls at recruitment fairs, from where they hand out glossy corporate literature of mind-numbing dullness and banality.

Among older bankers, it is received wisdom that students joining the industry now are as lacking in imagination and personality as the brochures designed to attract them. Where are the eccentrics of yesteryear? Where are the original thinkers? None would get near a place at an investment bank today, runs the argument, now that students have to prepare for job interviews as though they were exams and work hard for their degree.

Banks' recruitment policies look vulnerable to such criticism. Increasingly, they hire academic high-flyers - anyone without a 2.1 from a top university can more or less forget about front-office investment banking these days.

They also like to hire students who are willing to give up the summer holidays of their penultimate year at university, when they are 19 or 20, to do a gruelling eight or 10-week internship, instead of spending the time travelling around somewhere or - horror of horrors - just staying at home and doing nothing much. Deutsche Bank says 50% of its graduate trainees held an internship first.

There are signs that first-year internships are becoming more common, too. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are among the banks that offer these. They could become yet another hoop for students to jump through at an even younger age.

However, conversations with the undergraduates at whom this is aimed show they are refreshingly unfazed by it. They treat it as a game they must play to get a job. If those older bankers with third-class degrees were at university today they would probably be doing exactly the same, without losing any of their independence of mind.

Asked what they think of the corporate brochures handed out at the stalls, students just roll their eyes. One said the only stall that impressed him last year was run by Citigroup, which allowed him to play a trading game and had some connection with reality.

As for living and breathing investment banking while still at university, even successful students manage to avoid this. One who has just completed an internship at a bulge-bracket bank cheerfully admitted he never read the financial press. Two said they found the Financial Times unbelievably boring. Another said she read Financial News, but the body language did not convince.

Quite how they got through interviews that supposedly grilled them about their devoti

on to derivatives and so on was not clear. Presumably it was by using their imagination.

Some students will do whatever it takes to get an internship just for the money, without necessarily having the slightest interest in banking. UBS pays 2,250 (€3,170) a month - a serious sum for most undergraduates. One IT student who did an internship at a British bank said he made no secret while he was there of his ambition to be a rock star and of his boredom with his job. That did not stop the bank offering him a full-time position, which he regretfully declined.

Many students, of course, know a great deal about investment banking and are set on it as a career. They can be as ruthless about getting what they want as the banks themselves.

"It's only worth working for a top-tier bank, such as Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. You'd never want to go and work for someone like Dresdner," said one.

This heartless and rather unfair approach is not shared by others, who touchingly say they do not care about reputations.

Signs of an economic upturn this year have made many students optimistic that they will find a job. They could be in for a shock. A careers officer at one top university estimates that the banks will hire 30% fewer graduate trainees than they did last year.

Things are probably not that bad. But however many are hired, older bankers with fond memories of their lazy student days can rest assured; the new intake of students are unlikely to be robotic clones.