What Is an Analyst?
An analyst is the most junior full-time professional at an investment bank, hired directly out of undergrad into a program that typically runs two to three years. The title sits at the bottom of the banking ladder, which climbs from analyst to associate, vice president, director, and managing director, with each rung shifting the job away from execution and toward client relationships.
The word also covers junior roles in equity research, where analysts help publish stock recommendations, and on the buy side at private equity firms, hedge funds, and asset managers. When students and recruiters say analyst without qualification, though, they almost always mean the investment banking version, which sets the template the other uses are measured against.
What Analysts Actually Do
Analysts own the ground-level execution work on live deals and pitches. That means building financial models such as comparable companies, precedent transactions, DCFs, and merger or LBO models, assembling pitch books, and maintaining the buyer lists, data rooms, and diligence trackers that keep a process moving. A single sell-side mandate can generate dozens of model iterations and hundreds of pages of materials, and most of it flows through the analyst.
The hours match the workload: 70-90+ hour weeks are standard, with the worst stretches hitting during live deals when client requests arrive at any hour. In exchange, analysts get a compressed crash course in accounting, valuation, and how transactions actually close, learning in two years what most corporate jobs would take far longer to teach.
Compensation and the Path Upward
First-year base salaries at major banks run around $100-110K, and the year-end bonus pushes all-in compensation to roughly $150-200K. Pay steps up in each subsequent analyst year, and strong performers can be promoted directly to associate rather than leaving for business school.
Many analysts never take that promotion. The program functions as a feeder into private equity and hedge funds, and a large share of each class exits to the buy side after two or three years. Others move into corporate development, startups, or MBA programs, where the analyst credential travels well.
Why the Analyst Role Matters for Recruiting
The analyst seat is the prize at the end of banking recruiting, and nearly all full-time offers flow through the summer analyst internship the year before graduation. Recruiting for those internships can start as early as sophomore year, running through networking calls and first-round interviews before culminating in a superday, so students who want the role have to prepare long before senior year.
The role's value also extends beyond banking itself. Because private equity firms recruit first- and second-year analysts on-cycle, sometimes within months of their start date, the analyst program has become the standard on-ramp to the buy side, and two years in banking remains one of the most portable credentials in finance.
