The Complete Coffee Chat Guide for Investment Banking Interviews

I want to start with the single most important thing I can tell you about coffee chats: they are not a formality, and they are not networking for its own sake. They are where the offer gets decided, very often before you ever sit down for a "real" interview.

Most of what follows comes from doing this myself. While I was recruiting I did 300+ coffee chats. Since then I've listened in on 150+ of my students' chats, and I've now been on the other side of the table, coffee chatted 50+ times. I'm telling you the numbers not to brag but because the lessons below aren't theory. They're the patterns that showed up over and over again, across hundreds of conversations, in what separated the students who got referrals from the ones who got ghosted.

Here's the other thing you should know about me, because it matters for how you read this guide. I'm extremely introverted. I spend about 90% of my time alone, I've always been a bookworm, and coffee chatting genuinely scared the sh*t out of me. My first chats were rough. Fifteen-second-awkward-silence rough. The only reason I got good is that I kept doing them, over and over, until I wasn't bad anymore. Now it's my full-time job helping students make that same transformation. So if you're dreading these calls, good. That's the normal starting point, and it's a starting point you can move past.

Let's get into it.

Why Coffee Chats Decide the Offer

A coffee chat does three jobs at once. Understanding all three is what turns a chat from "a thing I'm supposed to do" into the highest-leverage hour in your recruiting cycle.

They earn you the referral

The referral is essentially your ticket to the first-round interview. At most firms, you don't get into the first round on the strength of an online application alone. You get in because someone inside the firm vouched for you, and the coffee chat is how you earn that vouch. Everything else in this guide is, downstream, about this.

They hand you interview ammunition and insider information

The ammunition is the more valuable of the two, and it's the part students consistently overlook. When an analyst answers a question like "why did you choose banking?", you are hearing an answer that demonstrably worked. This person broke into the firm you want. Their behavioral answers got them the offer. You can take the exact reasons, phrases, and framing they use and adapt them into your own answers, confident that the substance is sound.

The insider information is less direct but still significant. Whether it's how a particular team is structured, what the culture is actually like, which deals the group has been on, or how the recruiting process really runs, being able to mention something in an interview that other candidates can't makes you look more credible, more prepared, and more genuinely interested in the firm. All of that is an advantage when you walk into a first round or a Superday.

Here's why the ammunition matters so much. The biggest problem students have in building high-quality behavioral answers is that they have no basis for comparison. People don't walk around reciting their scripted interview answers out loud, so you never actually hear what "good" sounds like. It's all relative, and since most students never break in anyway, the majority of opinions you'll get on your answers are close to worthless. The best people to review your answers are the ones who landed offers at the firms and in the roles you're chasing. Senior students are a great resource for this, but so are the professionals you coffee chat with. Why not use both?

Remember: technical questions are a bar to meet, while behavioral questions have no upper limit on quality. Technicals can keep you out, but behaviorals are what actually determine your offer. So a tool that systematically improves your behavioral answers, one chat at a time, is enormously valuable.

A practical way to use this: pick one behavioral question, say "Why investment banking?", and on your next chat aim to improve your current answer using theirs. In just 5 to 10 chats you could have everything you need to build strong answers for the Core 3 Behavioral Questions (TMAY, Why This Role, Why This Firm). After that, the only work left is adapting their material to your own experiences, speaking style, and personality.

They're a live rehearsal for the interview

Every coffee chat is different. There are more predictable stretches, but generally you're going to get put on the spot, and that's the point. A chat forces you to articulate your thoughts clearly and quickly, form coherent and intelligent responses in real time, and come up with tailored questions while simultaneously listening to someone speak. That is exactly the skill set a first-round interview tests. You can't build it by reading. You build it by reps.

Put the three together and you get the whole thesis: a coffee chat is the final hurdle before the interview, a source of inspiration for your behavioral answers, and a setting in which to practice them.

Who to Talk To, and in What Order

Who you network with changes by firm and by how much time is left before an application deadline. Some firms lean heavily on HR to arrange and run first-round interviews. Some prefer their analysts or associates to do it. Others, usually smaller shops, want you to speak with the head honcho directly, the partner or founder. That smaller-firm dynamic exists for a simple reason: there often aren't enough employees to delegate talent acquisition to, and given the size of the firm, the person at the top may want to be involved in every part of the business.

For the larger firms most readers of this guide are aiming for, the right move is to start all the way at the bottom, with analysts or, lower still, incoming and past interns. Then you work up. Here's why that order matters so much.

Start at the bottom: analysts and interns

There are two reasons to start with juniors.

First, they're the best source of ammunition and insider information. Analysts are the insiders closest to you in age, which makes these the easiest conversations you'll have relative to associates, VPs, EDs, and MDs. They were very recently successful recruiting for that exact firm, so their interview answers are proven. Copy them and use them.

Junior bankers are also far more generous with information. To a senior banker, an undergraduate is nowhere near an "asset," so seniors tend to put in relatively little effort on a chat, often doing little more than answering your questions curtly. To an analyst, you are an asset, so they're more giving with information and more forgiving of gaps in your understanding. And honestly, it makes sense to start there. If you want to learn about a firm as an undergrad, the people whose experience most resembles your potential future are the right first stop. Why would you talk to a managing director first about a firm you'd be joining as an analyst? When students do this, and I've done it too, it's usually because they're hoping to get lucky with the Big Man. "Who says no to an MD? HR? Bah!"

The kind of insider information juniors share can genuinely move your odds. If a particular analyst is in charge of recruiting, a past or incoming intern can tell you. If a specific person in HR is running point on undergraduate recruiting, an analyst can tell you. If a certain MD is the gatekeeper for first-round interviews, analysts or interns are the people most willing to share that. None of that is knowable from the outside, which is exactly why a student's odds are so impaired without networking.

Second, juniors are sufficient for a referral. At some firms a good word from a past intern is enough to get you a first round, though the vast majority will want the backing of an analyst or above. If you're short on time and can't methodically work your way up, talking to just one analyst is your single best use of time. Combine that with the fact that analysts are more likely than anyone senior to reply to a cold email, and analysts become the group you're most likely to get a referral from.

There's also a strategic payoff to talking to juniors first that pays off when you do email someone senior. You can name the people you've already spoken with, which accomplishes two things. One, it prevents you from being forwarded back "down" the hierarchy. Senior bankers, for reasons of time, convenience, and priorities, will often forward a student's cold email to analysts and associates, and a student who has already spoken to those levels doesn't want that. Naming those employees, and explaining that you're reaching out for a different perspective, justifies why you're contacting this person specifically. Two, it signals work ethic.

Here's exactly what that email does:

Think about it from the MD's side. If three students email him, one with no mention of other conversations, one mentioning a single chat, and one mentioning five, which is he most likely to reply to? Resume differences aside, it's obvious which candidate looks most deserving. The more likely outcome is that he forwards the strongest student's email down, but even then, the analyst or associate who receives it inherits the same positive impression, which only improves that student's odds. I can't guarantee naming people prevents the forward, but it maximally mitigates it.

A note on HR. Once you've spoken to an analyst or past intern, you'll usually have figured out how involved HR is in that firm's process. Some firms lean on HR very heavily. Bank of America, for example, runs all its first-round interviews as group coffee chats conducted by someone from HR. That's in stark contrast to Moelis, whose first rounds are always run by analysts and associates. If you discover HR is integral to a process, reach out to them, but go in knowing they'll drive the conversation, actively question you, and evaluate your candidacy from start to finish. Getting a chat with HR is easy. Impressing them to the point of a referral is a different story, so, like senior bankers, reach out to them only after you've spoken to a handful of analysts or associates. And don't get too bogged down in these specifics, because as long as you're actively networking, a lot of "what to do next" gets revealed at the end of your chats, when the other person offers recruitment advice and background on the firm.

Associates and the "gatekeeper"

From a student's perspective, an associate is generally about as useful as an analyst. They might have the final say on first-round candidates, but more often they work alongside analysts to decide who advances. A single associate chat can produce a referral, but the more likely outcome, if the chat goes well, is that they refer you either up to a VP or down to an analyst.

If they refer you up, that VP is probably running point on recruitment and using analysts and associates as a first line of defense, taking calls only with students who've been vetted by juniors. It is absolutely essential to reach the "gatekeeper" at firms that run their process this way. If they refer you down, the firm is likely using analysts to sniff out the most deserving candidates, and the associate who referred you will discuss your candidacy with that analyst, trusting that their recency in recruiting and closeness in age makes for the most accurate read on a student.

Senior bankers: your training ground

I think of conversations with VPs, directors, principals, and MDs as a levered-up version of conversations with juniors. Like leverage amplifies returns in both directions, a senior person's impression of you, good or bad, has an outsized effect on your candidacy. So preparing for these calls is non-negotiable, and the best way to prepare is, again, by talking to other employees first. I'd even check with those junior employees whether talking to a senior is necessary at all. If it isn't, why risk the bad impression?

That said, senior chats double as the best possible training ground. Think about distance running. Professional runners train at altitude, and when they return to normal conditions their bodies, acclimated to lower oxygen, outperform. Same idea here. If you train your coffee-chat skills against the hardest employee group, every subsequent chat with HR, analysts, or interns feels easy, and you'll improve faster than your peers. Just make sure these "practice" chats are in low-risk settings, meaning with people in positions outside your actual goals, because first impressions last.

What You're Actually Aiming For

Now that you know why chats matter and who to do them with, let's talk about what you're trying to walk away with. This is subtler than it looks.

Forget the "referral." Aim for an introduction.

The aim of any coffee chat is to improve your odds of receiving a first-round interview invitation. I deliberately don't say "earn a referral," because 99% of the time you won't know whether you got one until the exact date invitations go out. Making the referral your explicit goal holds you to an invisible, unachievable standard. Worse, trying to decode your "odds" from the other person's mood on the call is an impossible game that does nothing but undermine your confidence.

I know this because it happened to me. I got interview invitations from firms whose employees were dry and difficult to talk to, and I got ghosted by firms whose employees implied I was in pole position. My read on people was completely wrong and completely unproductive.

So because your odds can't be measured, aim instead for a referral to another employee in every chat. Their willingness to connect you onward is a usable approximation of their impression of you. Some employees aren't in a position to offer an interview referral, but every one of them can introduce you to a colleague. The flip side: if they don't, you're unlikely to get a first round. You may have done something that told them you weren't good enough, or maybe they've already shortlisted and see another introduction as wasted time.

That said, don't over-read disposition. A lot of factors drive someone's behavior on a call, and being warm to a student is nowhere near the top of their priority list. Not being connected onward is generally a bad sign, but what if they're just slammed and forgot? We all have bad days.

I can already hear you: "Okay Matthew, hold on. You talked about referrals this whole time, then said the aim isn't actually referrals. Then you said that new aim was wrong, and that a referral is still the aim but a different kind. And now you're saying that even if I don't get one, that doesn't necessarily mean I didn't make the cut? Where are you going with this?"

You're right. It's confusing, and that's the point. What you're reading are the insights from 300+ of my own coffee chats, from listening to 150+ of my students' chats, and from being coffee chatted 50+ times. The root cause of the confusion is the opaqueness of coffee chats, everything that happens behind closed doors between HR, analysts, and associates. There is no silver bullet, no one-size-fits-all formula for converting chats into referrals. Things that work with one person flop with another. This year's process involves different people than last year's. Someone might love a certain accent and hate another, or maybe you're genuinely not the right behavioral fit.

If I've learned anything, it's that consistency is king. There are endless factors outside your control, and a handful of crucial things inside it that you must nail in every single chat. Those controllable things are what make some chats better than others, what let a student with less experience beat one with more, and what ultimately contribute to a referral. The whole back half of this guide is those controllable things.

The second objective: information

If the primary objective is being introduced to other helpful contacts, the secondary objective is extracting information about job openings, the status of a recruitment process, and advice for interview success. This sounds obvious, and it is, but you'd be amazed how narrow your focus gets in a chat, especially when you've spent the last twenty minutes barely keeping the conversation alive. So type up the questions you want to ask at the end of the chat before it starts, and keep them in front of you the whole time.

My prep "dashboard" (and why it was overkill)

That brings me to the setup I used. Here's everything I'd have open before any chat:

• Their LinkedIn profile
• My resume
• My TMAY and "Why this role?" answers
• My personalized question list (for mid-chat and chat-end) and small-talk material (for the start)
• A technicals reference (I used ibvine.io, all topics, in List view)
• A notetaker (Excel, Docs, Notes, whatever)
• My other scripts (intro, transitions, questions, responses)

I ran this across two laptops so everything was at my fingertips, no Alt+Tabbing. On the first screen I kept my Excel notetaker on the left and the person's LinkedIn on the right. The Excel tab did triple duty: my prepared small-talk topic, my live notes, my personalized question list, my behavioral scripts and their role-specific variations (an IB TMAY versus a PE TMAY, for example), my transition scripts, and my three to five recruitment questions. That single screen gave me everything I needed to drive the first ten to fifteen minutes of any chat at a glance.

For small talk I kept a few news articles handy. In my case it was Bain's annual Private Equity Report, and depending on what someone disclosed on LinkedIn I'd research market trends and M&A in their coverage or product group, plus any notable headlines in their city, usually Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, or San Francisco. I kept their LinkedIn visible not to stare at it, but to glance at periodically, especially as they answered, to see if anything in their background connected to what I was about to say. Those little "one-uppers," ingrained over time, are a big part of how I landed referrals at elite boutiques like Perella Weinberg Partners, Moelis, and Evercore. Around the ten-to-fifteen-minute mark, their LinkedIn stopped being useful, so I'd swap it for my resume to reassure myself I could field anything on it.

The second screen was a blank browser on the left for any intra-chat research, headlines, valuation trends, rate news, and my technicals reference on the right, just in case. A quick warning on the research, though: you can only pull off live research once you can comfortably carry a chat past the twenty-minute mark while having an actual conversation. If you can't yet hit a 60/40 conversation split, there's no point dressing up your answers, because you're not getting the referral anyway. Preparedness and personality.

On technicals, it's very rare you'll get asked them on a chat, and if you do, take it as a good sign: firms only test candidates who look like they deserve a first round. Keeping a reference open just lets you focus on the conversation instead of straining to catch a technical question coming.

Now, the honest disclaimer. You might think this setup is overkill, and that I was an anxious mess while recruiting. You're not wrong. To most people it's overkill, but to me it was due diligence. Most of the time it didn't help, but for the five or ten chats where it did, it was well worth it. (It didn't help that I had about five deals on the resume I used that cycle and was always scared someone would go deep on one, so I made sure I could answer any walkthrough question on the spot.) Treat the rig as one person's extreme, not a requirement. Take the principle, which is to have your scripts, questions, notes, and references within reach so your brain is free to listen and respond.

Landing the Chat: Reach Out Early

This is technically a step before the chat itself, but it shapes who agrees to talk to you and how much rapport you start with, so it belongs here. The deep mechanics of email outreach and follow-up templates are a topic of their own, and our Email Networking Course covers them in full. But the philosophy is essential, so let's cover that.

Sun Tzu: "Every battle is won before it is fought."

The battle you're fighting is for a job offer, and you won't win it if you don't stand out. The truth most students get wrong is this: when you reach out matters less than what you reach out with. The content of your email should change based on how close you are to the firm's interview process.

Most students think you can't reach out eight months before a process because, well, "that's too early." What a wonderful explanation. "I can't network early because it's too early." Let's fix that. The real reason you feel you can't reach out that early is that the email you're imagining is overtly built around the interview process. You mention the SA'26 cycle, that you're "interested in learning about potential internship opportunities," that you'd "love to learn about the firm."

Picture the classic version sent during penultimate-summer networking.

It announces the sender's summer plans at a brand-name fund, names the internship cycle they're chasing at the recipient's firm, and asks for a call about "potential internship opportunities" – transactional from the first line to the last. For the line-by-line teardown of that email, see how to cold email a banker.

Sent well in advance of the cycle, this won't land. All networking is transactional, but this is so overtly transactional that it works against you. So what if you made it about them instead? If your email focused purely on the recipient, their background, and the specific things you found interesting about both, two things happen. They're surprised to get an email from a student with no mention of a job, so you stand out, and they're far more likely to take a chat (assuming your resume is good enough to interview at that firm in the first place).

Then, if you nurture that connection over the next six months or so, sending a light nurture email roughly every three months just to stay on their radar, there's a strong chance they become an advocate for your first-round invite. Bigger than if you'd emailed cold the day the posting dropped. You've built a genuine relationship, and having never asked for a job-related favor, you've accumulated enough goodwill to cash in for that interview.

I know most of you aren't in a position to be networking more than seven months out from your dream role. That doesn't matter. This is a competition and everyone plays for themselves. If you're not in a position to network, someone else is, and that's who you're up against.

What's wrong with waiting

A few things, and they compound:

You stand out less and less over time. If two months ago there were 50 students networking a firm, now there are 200, next month 400, and when the posting drops there will be thousands. To wait until the posting is to eliminate your odds, if your resume is average.

You look like every other candidate, transparently chasing a referral. Remember the scene in The Incredibles where Syndrome says, "And when everyone's super, no one will be." Same logic. If everyone knows these chats are about referrals, act as if no one does. It's everything but asking for the referral that gets you the referral. And yes, even if you reached out two months earlier they'd still assume you wanted one. What's different about reaching out early is that you're doing it before anyone else, so instead of looking like one of hundreds of desperate students, you look organized, prepared, and serious about your career. In one word: an asset.

You guarantee an awkward, generic email. Reactive networking carries an overwhelming sense of urgency. You can't ask directly for a referral, so you try to signal intent without sounding entitled, and you end up writing something like this:

This email isn't wrong. It's just too generic, the kind you fire off in a blast when there are three days left before a deadline. Personalizing every one would take forever, and stripping out the mention of internships feels self-defeating, because if you don't express interest, why would they pick your email over one where the interest is obvious? That's the trap of networking late: you either look desperate and identical to everyone else, or you look like you only want an informational chat with no real interest. Either way, with an average resume, your odds of a competitive first round are near zero.

Make the email about them

Start early and there's no need to blast. You have the room for a methodical, organic approach that builds real relationships. The rule of thumb is to speak to 2 to 5 people at a given firm to maximize your odds of a referral. The subscript I'd add: ideally those people after the first were secured organically, meaning the first person referred you to the second, who referred you to the third, and so on. The first person only does that if they think you're a winning horse, if you've built enough rapport and they see you as an asset. Your asset-likeness comes from the chat and your resume, but the rapport starts before the chat, in an outreach email that mentions no internship and no cycle and focuses entirely on the recipient. In fact, it was usually something about the recipient, not the firm or role, that prompted me to reach out at all.

Here's that email:

The rebuilt version opens with the recipient: the deal they just worked on, the club they ran in college, the prep resources they authored that you actually read and shared. Only after that bridge does it ask for a quick call – and there's no mention of a cycle or an internship anywhere in it. The exact wording lives in my networking email templates.

This takes more than a couple of seconds, which is exactly why most students won't do it, and exactly why it works.

A cautionary tale about blasting

When networking is delayed, pressure builds, and the moment you finally start, the urge is to blast as many firms as possible to make up lost time. This is where it gets hairy, and I speak from experience.

It was January when I started my US investment banking cycle, and I was feeling it. I'd already missed mega-fund PE recruiting and hadn't networked with a single US bank. So I started blasting any elite boutique I saw Canadians working at: Centerview, PJT, Moelis, Evercore, PWP. I emailed roughly 100+ PJT employees and got zero responses. Why? Because I emailed all of them in one week. How do I know that was the problem? A friend with an objectively worse resume got in touch with a handful of analysts. The difference was that he went slow, two emails a week to their NYC office. My follow-ups to PJT got nothing either. There could be other explanations, but his weaker resume getting traction told me I'd rubbed someone there the wrong way.

It's not isolated. A friend emailed four BDT-MSD analysts in one week in November 2023, for the SA'25 cycle. Two days later one of the analysts wrote back to say people in the office had talked and were displeased to see a student emailing four people at once with near-identical messages. He did not get a first round. Another friend emailed five Ducera Partners employees in one week during the SA'23 cycle and quickly got an angry email from a Director saying he wasn't "allowed" to do that. Weirdly, I did the same thing at Ducera and didn't get the angry email. Even weirder, we both ended up with interviews, mine for LA and NYC, his just for LA, and after we did them, neither of us ever heard from the firm again.

And if all of this feels intimidating, that's okay. It's worth repeating: I'm extremely introverted, I spend 90% of my time alone, and coffee chatting terrified me. My first chats were genuinely awful, fifteen-second-awkward-silence awful. But because I kept doing them, I got better. And better. And now it's my full-time job helping students do the same. If I can do it, you can too.

The Core Skills: Introduction, Conversation, Structure

Now the controllable things. These first three are the skills that decide the referral. The rest are habits that stack on top. Note that I'll teach the concepts here in depth, then show you the exact scripts in the tactical walkthrough at the end, so you see the idea and then watch it applied.

Never wing your introduction

The TMAY exchange in the first two to five minutes is your single best chance to prove you're a colleague, and botching it can eliminate your shot at a referral. There's no excuse for anything less than a perfect delivery. Any professional understands that an introduction, however short, is the first and often only window a stranger gets into their background, so its content should capture everything you want someone to know about you professionally, and its delivery should convey the polish you'd expect from a high-caliber employee.

Think of your introduction as the lens through which the other person sees you for the rest of the call. There are only two stretches of a chat where you have free rein to say what you want, the beginning and the end, and the end comes after your referral has already been decided. So really, it's the beginning that matters. A weak intro leaves a sour taste: "This student can't even introduce himself properly. This is going to be a long thirty minutes." And because you introduce yourself in every chat, a sloppy TMAY signals either that you don't do enough chats or that you don't take this seriously. Neither makes you someone they want to work with.

The flip side is just as real. When you've clearly put time into your TMAY, both content and delivery, people notice and respect it. It won't win the referral on its own, but it's an essential step toward it. Since everyone in a position to give you an interview or offer is currently a stranger, perfecting your introduction is the highest-ROI activity in all of recruiting.

Have a conversation, not a Q&A

You've heard this a hundred times and probably found it impossible to internalize, partly because nobody ever defines the difference cleanly. Here's a simple test, measured after the small talk and TMAY exchange:

• Q&A: they talk more than 80% of the time.
• Conversation: the split is roughly 60–70% them, 30–40% you.

The problem isn't diagnosing which one you're having. It's actually having a conversation. So next time, record the talking times for both of you. You won't act until you come face-to-face with the problem, and I'd wager many of you are running Q&As consistently right now. Not good.

The reason "have a conversation" isn't as simple as "talk more" is that there's a limited amount you can say. We're measuring past the first five minutes, the part where you ask and they answer. To just talk more would imply you've stopped listening. If they describe the deals they're on and you respond with your take on Jerome Powell's latest speech, you might be splitting the mic 50/50, but that's a conversation you do not want to have. So you have to stay on-topic, while having very little control over the topic. Merely clarifying what you didn't understand implies weak knowledge of their job. Merely acknowledging and moving on, even to something relevant, implies you have no self-awareness or are steering toward easier ground. Neither is ideal.

Here's the fix. Instead of jumping to your next question, demonstrate that you understood their point. If they talked for two minutes, summarize it in under 25% of that time, roughly 30 seconds, then either relate it to a past experience of yours or raise the point you wanted to clarify. If it's the former, use that experience as the segue into your next question, one related to what they said but still moving forward. If it's the latter, state what you expect them to say or walk them through your thinking before you ask.

So the flow of any coffee-chat response is one of these two:

Their (2-minute) Answer => Your (~30 second) Summary => Your Past Experience => Your Next Question

Their (2-minute) Answer => Your (~30 second) Summary => Point to Clarify => Your Thought Process / What You Expect Them To Say => Your Next Question

Let me show you what this looks like in a real chat. The exchanges below are from a conversation one of my students had with an associate on Bank of America's NYC investment banking team. Watch the student's replies.

Her opening turn ran from a concert-piano background through the analyst-to-associate climb on BofA's Technology team, a red-hot tech market that kept her staffed on deals, and a pause inviting questions. His reply played her story back in thirty seconds, surfaced his own childhood piano training, and asked about her pianist years before going anywhere near the job. Both turns, word for word, are in how to stand out in a coffee chat.

See how he first summarizes what she said, so she feels heard, then relates a past experience of his own, then segues into his next question? The associate here had a background in musical performance, and the student made sure to focus on it because he understood it was integral to maximizing rapport on this call. Most students would have blown right past it. I'm sure the moment he paused to double-click on it, she realized she wasn't talking to an average student. If he'd skipped it, there might not have been another chance in the conversation to score those personality points.

Contrast it with the lazy version:

"Got it, thank you for the background. What was it like to be a professional pianist?"

That wouldn't have eliminated his chances, but omitting both his own piano experience and the summary of her introduction would absolutely put him behind any student who included them.

Here's the second exchange, in brief.

She described a team with an unusual shape – two Associates, no VPs, one Director handing them VP-sized work – and the student summarized it back, flagged how rare that structure is, and asked whether it had always been built that way before he'd even finished his own reasoning. The full back-and-forth sits in my coffee-chat questions walkthrough.

Notice that here the student asked the question before walking the associate through his thinking. That's fine. As long as you don't sound incoherent and your question is understandable, the exact sequencing after your summary is of little importance.

In both exchanges, the student stretches his responses to roughly 30 to 40% of the talking time, where most students would simply acknowledge and move on. You don't need to say anything revolutionary to clear the conversation threshold. You just need to be polite, show you understood, and ask a relevant question right after. The hard part is doing all of it at once: listening, forming your response, finding a past experience, and organizing your thoughts.

One tip that helps enormously: write down a question the instant it comes to mind. As the other person talks, there's a whirlwind of thoughts in your head, and an insightful question will surface and then vanish back into the noise if you're not quick. This is exactly why your notetaker matters. Jot points down the moment they arrive, and don't evaluate how good they are in the moment. Do that as they're wrapping up their answer, when you can afford to listen a little less and plan a little more.

Make your questions "complex," not simple

The two response flows are really just representations of how targeted a question is. Picture a spectrum. On the left sit simple, non-targeted questions. On the right sit complex, targeted ones, built out with either a walkthrough of your thought process or a story from your past.

On the left-hand side, you have questions like:

• What was the biggest challenge you faced going full-time in Investment Banking?

• What's your team structure like?

• What's the culture like at your firm?

There are two ways to make a simple question complex: Create a Statement (your thought process / what you expect them to say) or Craft a Story (a past experience of yours). Here's how I'd ask those same three questions using the first method:

And here's how I'd ask the same three using the second method, crafting a story:

Tying it all together: in any coffee chat you're solving for a conversation, not a Q&A, and you define those by the talking-time split (60/40 for a conversation, 80/20 for a Q&A), measured past the small talk and TMAY exchange. That reframes "have a conversation" as "talk more," but talking more was never the real problem. What to talk about is. So you augment your standalone question with a summary of their answer plus either a story from your past (segueing into a new but related question) or a walkthrough of your thinking on a point you wanted to clarify. Turning simple questions into complex ones also gives the listener boundaries for their answer, lets them be more specific and nuanced, and signals that you've put yourself in their shoes and are genuinely listening.

One honest caveat: pulling this off requires that you've already done a fair number of chats. Knowing when to jump in and how long to talk takes direct experience, because a coffee chat is unlike any conversation you have with friends or family. Getting comfortable in this setting is a prerequisite for sharing a view of your own, elaborating on theirs, and bringing both together to either probe deeper or move the call along.

Follow a structure that mirrors their story

There's a reason capital-markets interviews follow a distinct structure, behavioral then technical, and even within those buckets a set sequence. Behaviorals open with "Tell me about yourself," "Why this role," "Why this firm," then one to three more around strengths, weaknesses, why we should pick you, or a time you overcame a challenge. Technicals start with basic accounting and valuation and ramp up, often ending on a complex accretion/dilution or paper LBO question. Firms do this because it's easier to follow. You could learn something by throwing candidates into the blender, mixing behaviorals into technicals or alternating, but it's not worth distorting a candidate's performance.

Structure is appreciated in the professional world, and the easier it is to follow, the better. You see it in a table of contents, in the intuitive tab arrangement of a financial model, in the agenda at the start of any meeting. Coffee chats are the same, except the structure is unspoken. If anything would make your call feel like a Q&A besides prefacing each question with "my next question…", it would be announcing an agenda at the very start. Beyond that, telling someone in a position of authority, who carved time out of a day far busier than yours, how you'd like them to run the call is staggeringly entitled. Imagine a high schooler asked how you got into your college program, you agreed, and then they sent a list of logistics: where to meet, when, what to wear, and the exact topics you should cover. They might look prepared, but they also look like they have no self-awareness and think their objectives outrank yours.

So we're talking about a dynamic structure, not a static one. It depends on who you're talking to and what they want to discuss. It's subtle enough that they can't quite tell you're following a structure, but what isn't subtle is the absence of confusion when your questions flow in an organized way. That clarity rubs off on how they perceive you: organized, with a plan, but a plan used as an outline rather than a bible. Most students use their prepared question list as a bible, and that is a one-way ticket to Q&A-land.

The structure to follow is the same one the person follows when they introduce themselves. Remember that your introduction should hit your most important and impressive professional points, and that a colleague is someone who can do that flawlessly. The person you're speaking to has reached colleague status, so their introduction is already refined to the salient points. It makes sense, then, to touch on those exact points throughout the conversation, because that's what maximizes rapport. Listen closely to the timeline implicit in their intro and note the important "chapters." Common ones include pre-college (often a sport or activity they did at a high level), college (their finance catalyst, clubs, recruitment, internships), post-college (full-time analyst, "figuring it out," current firm), and for senior bankers, their twenties (switching careers, a notable accomplishment, moving countries). Use those chapters to bucket your questions, which makes it far easier to turn a simple question into a complex one.

Skip the structure and you end up asking unrelated questions throughout, which paints you as disorganized, unsure what you want from the conversation, and only half-listening. When you hop around, you neither make them feel heard nor build any rapport. And no, "I'll just riff and go with the flow" isn't a real counterargument. The only students who say that are the ones who don't want to do the marginal work a structure requires. If you've done 50 chats and I've done 200, and I consistently follow a structure, who do you think has the smoother conversation? As with everything in this guide, try it in your own chats before deciding. Direct experience is king, and there's no substitute for it.

The Habits That Separate You From the Pack

These stack on top of the core skills. None of them is hard. Most are low-hanging fruit. Their absence is exactly what tips the scales toward a student who did them.

Prepare a list of personalized questions

Imagine you have ten units of mental processing power. During a chat that capacity is spent either crafting your next question or responding to their answer. Spend all of it on crafting questions and you've made the chat a Q&A, because you're only acknowledging, not responding. That's what happens in most chats. Students are so consumed with keeping the conversation alive that they can't spare any brainpower to actually respond, which is understandable given the stakes and given that most haven't done enough chats to do both at once. But a Q&A will never get you a referral.

A prepared list of personalized questions takes the burden of inventing questions on the spot off your plate, freeing up that mental capacity for more intelligent responses that build rapport and convey understanding. Sticking rigidly to the list is just as bad, though. If you can't adapt to where the other person takes the conversation, and they'll take it somewhere unexpected about 90% of the time, they won't feel heard or understood, and they won't refer you. In their head: "Was this student even listening? He keeps saying 'okay' and then jumps to something unrelated. Does he understand what I'm saying?"

Before every chat, aim to craft 5 to 10 personalized questions based on their background. Expect to ask only one or two, but know that those one or two can genuinely tip the scales, and that the benefits of the exercise go well beyond the questions you actually ask. Preparing is itself a skill that gets faster with reps. I spent about 30 minutes prepping the first couple of chats of my penultimate cycle, already after 100+ chats over the prior six months, and got that down to about 5 minutes by the end. A "personalized" question, by the way, means one that would stop making sense if you swapped this person's name for someone else's. (For a deeper treatment of the small-talk side of this, we have a dedicated "How To: Small Talk" resource.)

Show humility

This one's simple: don't be an a**hole on these calls. The people you're talking to are ahead of you, and you should treat them that way. It won't always be true forever, but it's true now, so be humble and don't say anything that could read as arrogant. Arrogance usually shows up in one of two forms: absolute statements about a topic the other person knows far better than you, or a convoluted, irrelevant question about a deal or the markets designed to show off.

Here's the "in absolutes" version:

"I saw you left consulting for Investment Banking, and I'm sure you'd always planned to escape since consulting is mostly slide decks anyway, and you must be glad to finally be doing real analysis. Did you look at Private Equity too?"

The problem is it leaves no room for an alternative, or it frames any alternative as abnormal. The tone is prescriptive rather than inquisitive, "you should've done this" instead of "you did this, here's why I think you did, but I'd love your perspective." It might not be every question you ask, maybe just one or two, but that's enough to lose to someone who didn't sound like a know-it-all. Record a chat and listen back if you don't believe me.

Here's the "show off" version:

"You're in the Shipping group at the First Bank of Iceland, so what's your read on the recent collapse in freight rates driven by the new canal tolls announced by the 3 biggest transit authorities – Panama, Suez & Kiel – particularly since the IMF has hinted at revising its trade forecast after the Economist ran that cover story on the post-pandemic supply-chain unwind – did you get a chance to read it?"

That's deliberately exaggerated, and I doubt any of you are showing off that egregiously, but you can probably see traces of your own convoluted questions in it. You know the restaurant saying, "location, location, location," meaning where the restaurant sits matters more than the food? Coffee chats are the same. The "food" is the convoluted question, the one meant to display your depth of knowledge, and its quality can only be realized if the "location" is right. In a chat, location is simply when you ask it: how related is it to what they just said? You'll only get this right after 10 to 20 chats. A game is only fun once you learn its rules, so pay down that ignorance debt as fast as you can.

Send follow-ups, and don't pester

Put yourself in a professional's shoes. You're asking them for help, and they're in no way obligated to give it. That's the source of the common belief that "following up more than X times is rude." It's rude mostly because most students don't know how to ask for help properly, meaning politely, professionally, and pleasantly. Our Email Networking Course has the actual follow-up templates if you want them.

Every follow-up is a reminder for someone to do a thing you asked, and you're not the only student emailing them repeatedly, nor are any of you remotely near the top of their priorities. But here's the thing: while some students email and follow up, the vast majority don't. Consider the funnel. In a group of 100 finance students, about 80 will say they want to do investment banking, and only 50 will actually start networking for it. Of those 50, only 30 will be diligent enough to keep at it across at least two semesters, roughly eight months. The 20 who drop out can't withstand the continual rejection that's critical to any recruiting process, "critical" because on any given day, for any given role, sending 100 outreach messages will never yield 100 responses. The rejection you face is a lagging indicator of your determination. And of the 30 who send those initial messages, only about half, around 15, will track their outreach methodically and take a scientific approach. That group is the one that tends to advance to the first round. Tracking is the only way to know who to follow up with and when, so it's only those students who send more than one email to a professional. That's why every follow-up you send literally separates you from the pack.

When you do follow up, remove any blame for forgetting and any obligation to have replied. You can do that with lines like:

By minimizing the ask, reducing the time commitment, it's human nature that they feel more inclined to say yes. And understand that when your email goes unanswered, your first instinct, "they deemed me unworthy," is usually wrong. More often they're simply too busy, or you slipped down their priority list and they forgot. Most professionals do take networking calls. So if they go quiet, a follow-up that reads as persistence and diligence rather than frustration is exactly right. Part of why follow-ups feel so fraught is the fear that you won't get another chat with anyone from that firm, and the pressure mounts the longer you go unanswered. The antidotes are the same two I keep repeating: start early, and follow a rules-based approach that removes emotion from the decision. If you're unsure about cadence, our Networking Journey resource maps the appropriate follow-up timing.

Be polite, but not too polite

Politeness here means thanking them for their time when you hop on, offering to call them, and sending a thank-you email 3 to 12 hours after the chat, depending on whether it was morning, afternoon, or evening. The trap students fall into is taking politeness to its extreme: thanking the person after every answer and then profusely again at the end. Besides sounding disingenuous and hurting rapport, it makes the chat more formal than it needs to be. Think about it, the only settings where you thank someone after every single answer are Q&As. You're trying to strike a balance between formal and conversational, and our instinct as students talking to professionals we've never met is to overshoot toward formal, because we don't want to risk anything rude. Fair enough, but you're also supposed to position yourself as a colleague, and you can't do that while being overly formal.

The right balance: say thank you at the start and end of the chat, in reference to the time they're giving you. If they raise an insightful point or share something genuinely useful, of course thank them for it, but not for every point they make. Offering to call the person who accepted your request is just common courtesy. I know talking to professionals feels like walking on eggshells, but remember they're normal people too.

Vary your acknowledgements

It's so easy to forget to vary your acknowledgements, and so noticeable when you don't. Repeating the same word makes you seem inattentive or like you're going through the motions, even when you're genuinely engaged and simply forgot to switch it up. That third case, interested but forgetful, is the one most students fall into. You rarely actually zone out on a chat, but to the professional it can sound like you did. The common acknowledgements are "got it," "that makes sense," "thank you for that," "okay," "sounds good," and so on. Fortunately this is low-hanging fruit. What worked for me was keeping five different acknowledgements on screen during a chat, on my dashboard, so if I felt like I wasn't varying enough, I could glance up and grab another without much thought. I also tried to consciously cycle through all five, but that used more brainpower than I wanted, so I reverted to just having them available.

Never ask yes/no questions

A yes/no question instantly turns a chat into a Q&A, the one thing we're desperate to avoid. Beyond interrupting the flow, it positions you as someone who didn't do their research and comes off as lazy and uninterested, which often genuinely frustrates the other person. These are questions you could confidently answer online or, with where AI is today, using ChatGPT or another large-language-model chatbot. If you can find it online, why are you asking a professional?

There are two reasons people ask them anyway. One, you didn't look online, you were lazy, which is very avoidable and is part of why you prepare questions beforehand: trying to find answers in advance shows you what's online and what isn't, so you can refocus on the latter. Two, and more common, a piece of information was missing from what's online, maybe the professional's unique perspective or an applied understanding of what you read. But if you don't show them the research you did, they'll assume you did none. Walking them through your thought process fixes this, as does outlining what you expect their response to be. Doing both before you ask benefits everyone: they understand where you're coming from, and you look well-researched and prepared. If you genuinely need to clarify something, you can ask a yes/no question, but that's usually done to frame a much larger question correctly before passing the mic back. Phrased another way: your coffee chat questions should always be hunting for an opinion.

Be ready for the rare "evaluative" chat

For ultra-competitive processes, where more candidates are networking than there are first-round slots, firms sometimes run "evaluative" coffee chats that double as interviews, covering basic behavioral, technical, and resume-specific questions. You can't tell whether a chat will be evaluative until you're on it, and there's no difference in how you prepare for one versus an actual interview. The best way to avoid getting caught flat-footed is, you've heard it a hundred times, to prepare early.

These are genuinely rare. Personally I've only had three chats where I was asked interview questions. One was with UBS, where I got grilled on LBOs for the fifteen minutes after the TMAY exchange. Another was with BofA, where an employee asked about the three deals on my resume. The last was with KKR, where I was networking for a spot in their Reinsurance Private Equity group and walked an associate through a deal on my resume for about ten minutes.

To be ready, keep these open before any chat: your pre-written behavioral answers (TMAY, Why this role, strengths and weaknesses, and so on), your scripted deal walkthroughs and stock pitches (the ones on your resume), your resume, and a technicals reference (I'd select "ALL" topics in List view for easy Ctrl+F). And take the rare evaluative chat as a good sign: firms only bother evaluating candidates who already look like they deserve a first round.

A Tactical Walkthrough: Start to Finish

Before this section, make sure you've internalized everything above, because what follows assumes you see coffee chats the way I do. If you don't yet, that's fine, it just won't be as enriching. These lessons take time to sink in, so don't be afraid to re-read this guide whenever your memory lapses.

"We need to be reminded more than we need to be taught."

I repeat that line a lot, and the repetition reflects how seriously I believe it. When I was recruiting, I felt bad about myself every time I had to re-learn something I thought I'd fully internalized. I assumed it meant I was somehow less-than. I know now how misguided that was. The reason for the frequent re-visits was that I was reading, doing, and learning more than I ever had in such a short window: corporate finance, capital-markets careers, the macroeconomy, email and LinkedIn networking, coffee chatting, college courses, technicals, behaviorals, investing, all while tracking interview processes and deadlines. Of course not everything stuck the first time.

For perspective, I probably re-read each of the BIWS guides about five times and recited my Core 3 behavioral answers 100+ times during the roughly three months of penultimate-summer recruitment. Measured by "did I learn something new," much of that was wasted. Measured by retention, the fundamentals and the best-sounding delivery of my answers, it was hugely productive. It took so much work because I wasn't going from 0 to 6 out of 10. I was going from 7 to 8 to 9 to 10. In any domain, going from good to great takes a disproportionate amount of work relative to getting good in the first place. I'm glad I did it and would do it again, but I'd change how I judged my progress, because it weighed on me more than was healthy. Point being: if this guide doesn't stick at first, read it again. And again. Practice is the only way to get better, and recruitment rewards those who train harder and longer than the rest.

The Beginning

Before you hop on, get clear on a few things. Their role: if you network for multiple roles, usually IB or PE, adjust your TMAY, how you describe certain resume experiences, and your questions to fit who you're talking to. If you don't have role-specific versions of your behavioral answers, build them now, and do this before every chat. Recruitment questions: always plan to ask about interview timelines, teammate connections, and staying in touch. Personalized questions: spend about 30 minutes researching the industries, asset classes, markets, firms, or geographies relevant to this person after reviewing their LinkedIn, and write at least five questions specific to them. Many students who landed amazing offers built their interview industry pitches from this pre-chat research alone. These minutes compound, so use them well.

Once you're on the call, introduce yourself:

You'll be antsy, so deliberately wait one to three seconds after their answer before responding. Then start with small talk. Don't dive into questions or your introduction unless they make it clear they have a hard stop. You're low on their priority list, so if they need to cut it short or got a last-minute request, don't take it as an insult or read into it.

Small talk should run about one to three minutes, and you should prepare jokes, questions, and responses in advance. Don't settle for the canned "it was busy, I had exams, but they're done now, so things are looking good." Instead, show some personality:

My choice of activities was arbitrary, swap in whatever's yours. This is how you flash your personality in a very short window, and it's what students who've mastered chatting tend to do. Extend the small talk until you sense they're losing interest, usually around 1.5 to 3 minutes in. Then step in with a quick background:

If they've signaled they want a short call but don't prompt you for your intro, use this instead:

Taking control at the start is important. It puts you in the driver's seat. Then deliver your introduction in about 60 seconds. Ninety seconds is fine for an interview, but on a chat, especially when they can't see your face, time passes more slowly. (Build your coffee-chat TMAY before your first chat.) This is Step 1 to a referral: your intro sets the tone and becomes the lens for the rest of the call, so your delivery should be flawless, no "um," no "you know," no "…anddddd…." Augment it with any of their interests you found online, and adjust it for their firm, group, or role. Then hand off:

As they introduce themselves, pay close attention to the chronology, because you'll mirror that sequence in your questions, and keep your notetaker ready, because their intro is full of tidbits you can use. When you're struggling to form a question off their most recent answer, reach back to something they mentioned earlier:

The Conversation

The key to this stretch is, as we covered, having a conversation, which is Step 2 to a referral and is measured by the talking-time split. Step 3 lives in responding and transitioning. We handled responding in the simple-to-complex section. Your transitions, like your TMAY, should be smooth, because they happen in every chat and can be confidently scripted.

Use your prepared list of personalized questions here, knowing you probably won't get through all of them, because making the other person feel heard matters more. If they stray from your intended topics, that's okay. Indulge them. They know what they're doing and often go off-topic to make a point or share a lesson. Follow their direction with one or two complex follow-ups, then steer back:

If they hit you with an unexpected behavioral, technical, or other question, don't fret. Whether they're curious or evaluating you, it's a good sign. You'll feel pressure to get an answer out fast, so resist it and take one to three seconds to breathe before speaking. Any "awkward" pause that creates (it won't, unless you go past four seconds) is more than repaid by the coherence and clarity of your answer.

It helps to think about questions by type, not just quality. There are two: interview ammunition and rapport-building.

Interview-ammunition questions are aimed at improving your own behavioral answers, the exact reasons, phrases, and context. You obviously can't ask them the way an interviewer asks you, so use the simple-to-complex continuum to bridge the gap. Professionals in a given role tend to give many of the same points to the most common behavioral questions, use those points to build your own, because the people who answer these correctly are the ones who broke in, and their answers are even better now that they've actually done the job. Here are the changes I'd make to common questions:

These look shorter than the questions in the simple-to-complex section because the summary and thought-process portions are chat-dependent.

Rapport-building questions fill the gaps that ammunition questions leave. If ammunition questions are "selfish," ones whose answers help you, rapport-building questions are "selfless," ones the other person enjoys answering. For instance, an analyst might like talking about their recruitment journey and how they got here, an associate about their first big deal or what earned them a promotion, a VP about the first deal they ran point on, a director about the first big client they landed. These should be the bulk of your conversation, because the primary aim is a referral and a huge component of that is rapport. The more you get them talking about themselves, the more they'll like you. Do that, speak like a colleague, and convey your readiness for the job, and the referral is yours. (A reminder on readiness: networking alone won't get you the first round. Your resume still needs a certain threshold of relevant experience.)

I'm not a fan of triangulating your odds in real time, but you should be able to read whether the other person is engaged, a deliberately neutral word as far as their impression of you goes. A decent rule of thumb is answer length: the longer their answers, the better. Still, you don't know what kind of day they've had, so read the room and treat all of this as something to experiment with, not gospel.

If you stumble into an awkward pause, often because you accidentally asked a yes/no question, just circle back to something earlier:

Use this same tactic if the chat is dry and you run out of personalized questions before the fifteen-minute mark. Candidly, though, if that happens, either you're not yet good at chatting or the other person was forced onto the call.

The Close

Transition into the close with:

Do this around the twenty-minute mark, and at the very least make it to fifteen minutes before transitioning. Ignore how the call has gone and ask your three essential recruitment questions, plus any others you prepared. It never hurts to ask, and since you're not asking for a referral anyway, there's no risk of putting them in the awkward spot of saying no. (Professionals will simply say "let me get back to you on that" and then often go quiet. If they ghost, remember you're low on their priorities and they may have just forgotten, so remind them in your thank-you email.)

The rationale for that transition is to be as polite as possible before you ask "selfish" questions. They know this part is coming and have been assessing you from the start, so asking for confirmation that they have time removes any chance they read your recruitment questions as entitlement. Beyond proving you're top talent, the other condition for a referral is expressing interest in the firm. Your outreach implied it, but make it explicit before you ask:

"Replicate that experience" is intentional. It isn't as premature or forward as "join your team" or "work with you," but it still carries enough weight to leave an honest, positive impression.

Here's how to ask the three essential recruitment questions:

When you ask for a teammate connection, prepare an idea of who and why in advance. Having a reason ready, however rough, is essential so you're not caught flat-footed when they respond with "What would you like to learn more about?" or "Who would be good for you to speak to?" That gets asked about 50% of the time and is, as far as you're concerned, a neutral indicator of performance. If they dodge or give curt answers to all your questions, that's not a good sign, and rather than fixating on your odds (which are probably zero), reflect immediately after the call on how you responded, introduced yourself, and framed your questions. Besides listening to peers' chats or having someone review yours, that reflection is the number-one way to find legitimate improvements for next time.

Once you've extracted what you need, end the call. This part matters least, because by now you've either earned the referral or you haven't, and nothing here changes that. Thank them and ask to stay in touch:

If you'd like, repeat one or two things they said and note what you found interesting. Then, in the 3 to 12 hours after the chat, send a thank-you email that both reminds them of whatever they said they'd "get back to you" on and recaps the salient points from your conversation.

That's the whole arc, from the cold email to the thank-you. None of it is complicated. All of it is hard to do consistently, and consistency, as I said at the very start, is king. Do these controllable things in every single chat, pay down your ignorance debt with reps, and the referrals will come.