Someone tells the terrible truth about life as a junior investment banker

It's the time of the year when interns turn up to spend 10 weeks at investment banks.

In Los Angeles, the interns are there already. One took it upon him/herself to write a blog about what really goes on. Despite being anonymous, this has been mysteriously pulled already and cannot be found.

However, the New York Times' Dealbook pulled out the most salient points yesterday.

They boil down to this: a junior M&A banker enjoys a thankless existence of pedantic drudgery.

To wit:

A large portion of my week has been spent formatting. Formatting letters, profiles, lists, databases, etc.; if you can imagine it, I probably formatted it this week. This exposed me to one of the pillars of corporate finance - an incredible attention to detail. Not only was the content of the reports I was compiling expected to be a hundred percent accurate, but so too was the formatting, which from what I gather, is suppose to display a sense of professionalism, both internally and to our clients.

And:

We do enormous amounts of work, efficiently, and in not so enormous amounts of time. ... We work ourselves to within an inch of our sanity because somewhere out there, in the distance, we see a faint and distant picture of our desired future. A future filled with summer homes in the Hampton's [sic], private jets, and model trophy wives, all by the age of thirty five.

The mysterious blogger was purportedly a fan of Leveraged Sellout, the now-retired blogger and author who famously wrote a covering letter to Lehman stating:

"I have been practicing staring at a computer monitor for extended hours. I can currently sit motionless in front of a screen for 28 hours, and I am improving daily."