Ask a banker whats it like ? NPR Money
Junior investment bankers spend 100 hours a week making spreadsheets and formatting client presentations; the main skills required are attention to detail, cheerful obedience, and the ability to add two-digit numbers in your head. After a while, though, you graduate into a more senior role where you spend 70 hours a week flying to the Midwest to shake hands with a corporate treasurer and ask him how his kids are doing in school. The main skills required there are a firm handshake, a facility with small talk, and a good but not too good golf game.
(Here is , but that's the gist of it. In non-investment-banking roles -- sales and trading, for instance -- this is not as true, but there is some truth to it even there.)
The fact that successfully completing four to six years as a spreadsheet jockey is the prerequisite for becoming a traveling salesman has always struck me as a particularly acute case of the . Somehow it mostly works out. Often, though, it doesn't, and excellent junior bankers fail to transition to the more client-facing sales role. This can lead to disgruntlement, and since sales is generally rather a grubby profession the disgruntlement might be expressed in ways that .
Still, there are a few things that might indicate you're cut out for a finance career. For one thing, it helps to like finance. Read the best book about mergers and acquisitions, , or the best book about sales and trading, , and ask yourself: does that sound fun? I mean, it's mostly not as fun as those books make it out to be, but: it's never more fun.