Lazard

Three things are named and all three have to appear: what you did, what you learned, and what that means for the programme. Start with the word explored, because it is doing the filtering. Explored means you went and did it without being made to, so a compulsory module or work experience somebody arranged for you is the wrong story even if it sounds more impressive. This question is written for first years with nothing on their CV yet, and that is deliberate: a company you got curious about, a deal you followed from announcement to close, a sector you read into, a stock you tracked and were wrong about, a society pitch you wrote. Then go narrow. One company or one deal, researched properly, beats three mentioned in passing, and the fastest way to prove you actually did the work is to say what surprised you, because nobody invents a surprise. Say where you went for it too, an annual report or a transcript rather than a news summary, since that distinction is visible to anyone who has done both. The third part carries the marks, and most answers skip it or fill it with wanting to learn more about banking. Make it a gap: name the thing your own reading could not give you and that only sitting inside the firm can. Following a deal from outside tells you what happened but not how the advice was argued or what the board was actually weighing, and that is the sort of answer that lands. Tie it to Lazard while you are there, since it is independent and advisory only, which means advice is the entire product rather than one service sold alongside lending.

Four things are asked for and the last one decides the answer. First the situation, and it has to be a genuine collision rather than a busy week: two or more things wanted at the same time with a real cost to getting it wrong. Then prioritising, where the marks go to having a rule rather than an instinct. Saying you did the most urgent first says nothing. Saying you ranked by what had a hard external deadline against what could quietly slip, or by what was blocking other people against what only blocked you, shows you can think about it. Then time management, which means the actual mechanism, not that you made a list: how you broke the work into sittings, what you protected, what you deliberately did to a lower standard because it did not need your best. Then the part most people never reach, which is what happened when circumstances changed. Something has to have gone wrong, a deadline moving, someone dropping out, the brief changing late, and the strong answer is usually not that you absorbed it silently. Renegotiating a deadline, handing something over, or telling somebody early that a piece would be late reads as better judgment than claiming you delivered everything perfectly, because an intern who hides a problem until the deadline is the one nobody wants. Finish on what you would keep doing. The whole question is a prediction of your first week with three people sending you work.

The shortest question in the set and the one to prepare first, because most people have no story ready for it. Two words carry it. Noticed means nobody pointed it out, so anything you were asked to fix is the wrong example however well you fixed it. Took action means you actually did it, not that you suggested it and nothing happened. Scale is irrelevant and chasing scale is the usual mistake: a society sign-up that lost people halfway, a spreadsheet at a part-time job that three people kept retyping by hand, a rota that broke every time someone swapped, a handover between committee years that meant starting from nothing. Small and real beats large and vague every time. Build it in four steps. What you noticed and what made it visible to you, since that is the half being marked and it shows you pay attention when nothing is being asked of you. What it was costing, in time, money, mistakes or people giving up. What you did. And what changed afterwards, with a number or a concrete before and after if you can possibly get one. If you had to talk somebody into letting you change it, put that in, because persuading people to accept a change is harder than spotting the problem and it is the rarer evidence. Lazard runs lean teams where juniors are expected to notice things rather than wait to be told, so this question is closer to the job than it looks.