Summer Prep: Timeline, Objectives, and Materials
A week-by-week plan for the summer before M1 - what to aim for, what to read and drill, and what it looks like when you are actually prepared to walk onto campus and recruit.
Summer is the one window where incoming MBAs still control their time. Once school starts, the calendar turns into coffee chats, info sessions, club events, second-year meetings, resume drops, and interview prep. If you arrive on campus still trying to learn the technical foundation from scratch, you are already behind.
The goal of summer is not to "get familiar" with banking. The goal is to become technically fluent enough that fall can be about networking and execution. By orientation, you should be reviewing technicals, not learning them for the first time. You should be refining your DCF walkthrough, not discovering what WACC is. You should be reading market news with context, not trying to decode every headline from zero.
Do not fly in blind. People do this every year, and a lot of them crash hard. MBA IB recruiting compresses too quickly for a last-minute sprint. You can polish in a week or two. You cannot build real fluency in a week or two. For the recruiting mechanics these summer actions are pointed at - the calendar, the players, how banks actually filter - see How MBA IB Recruiting Actually Works.
Start with GOBLIN100 as soon as possible. GOBLIN100 is the ordered ramp: 100 beginner questions that give you the baseline before the adaptive engine starts deciding for you. After that, live in GOBLINMODE for daily reps. Further along, use Topics for the areas you keep missing. Late in prep, when you are facing specific banks, offices, or rounds, use Bank / Round filters.
When the game actually starts
The single most common mistake in MBA IB recruiting is thinking you have until January. You don't. The game starts the week you arrive.
On-campus presence begins in week one. Info sessions, coffee chats, affinity events, and casual MD drop-ins begin inside the first two weeks of M1. The banks show up because they know the hiring decisions are already forming - not from the interview itself, but from the weeks of informal contact before the formal process opens.
Regional and West Coast timing. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and many regional boutique and middle-market offices run their own early process. Depending on the bank and year, this process can wrap by late October or early November. If you're targeting a regional seat, the prep calendar compresses dramatically - you are interviewing a month or two before the NY bulk even opens.
New York bulk. The main NY cycle typically lands in January, with formal superdays clustered across two or three consecutive weekends. But this is the average, not a rule. Superdays and closed-list outreach for candidates already on a bank's radar can start as early as October or November, especially at elite boutiques that recruit selectively. A candidate in a first-round NY process in November is not an anomaly.
The implication for summer prep. Summer is when you learn. Fall is when you execute. You are not prepping to walk in cold in January. You are prepping so that by orientation week, you can hold a fluent fifteen-minute technical conversation with a banker at a pre-term mixer without sounding like a first-week student.
MBA timeline
May - Field Orientation
- Do GOBLIN100. Start GOBLIN100 as soon as possible. The point in May is not mastery; it is getting the baseline vocabulary and seeing the shape of the field.
- Follow OFFERGOBLIN Live. Watch OFFERGOBLIN Live / weekly office hours live or on replay. Use May to learn what banking actually is, how bankers talk, and which questions real candidates are asking.
- Learn what investment banking actually does. Use the early office-hours arc as the checklist: advisory vs. capital markets, coverage vs. product groups, IB vs. other paths, and day-in-the-life reality. Read Bankers as Butlers and IB vs. Commercial Banking if the field still feels fuzzy.
- Start building a market view. Listen to Bloomberg Intelligence and/or Wall Street Breakfast a few times per week, then use How to Build a Market View Before MBA IB Recruiting to turn the habit into a simple recruiting answer.
- Make early decisions. By the end of May, start narrowing region, group logic, bank-office list, and commitment level using Early Decisions. You do not need a perfect answer yet, but you need to stop treating every path as equally likely.
- Draft "why banking?" v0. Keep it rough. The goal is a first-pass motivation draft, not a polished interview script.
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