I worked at Goldman Sachs.
I'll copy an answer I wrote for a similar question. I briefly worked at a hedge fund in 2007 and spent 2008-2012 on the phone working with hedge fund traders and portfolio managers. My answer goes for both the sell-side and the buy-side of the street.
Wall Street jobs are less about your degree and more about:
1. Your ability to learn complex information quickly. I have a degree in Finance and used less than 5% of it in my jobs as an equity derivative and cross-asset sales-trader. I worked with people who were literal rocket scientists and others with music degrees. If you really want to work in finance, get a degree with some math and/or structure. "Hard" quantitative skills trump "soft" qualitative skills, but most roles still require good social skills (it's called being "commercial").
2. Your critical thinking / technical analysis skills (not the charting kind).Finance is driven by complex and non-constant statistical relationships. You need to be able to grasp these concepts because the outputs of some relationships are inputs into others. They build on each other. Pick up "Heard on the Street" by Michael Crack.
3. Your knowledge of public market finance before even stepping into the interview. Understanding both the practical and academic fundamentals of asset classes. I literally read and studied thousands of pages of finance textbooks. I hogged the only Bloomberg terminal in my college. Do what it takes to show that you are hungry to learn by genuinely spending your FREE TIME investing in yourself.
4. A track record of relentless self-discipline and work ethic. Pack your schedule. Many firms hire collegiate athletes because of the long hours and commitment those students made. It takes an immense amount of self-discipline to balance school workload, practice 15 hours a week, and possibly even juggle a job or internship. Firms want to see if you can put in 12 hour days and not be fatigued by week 12.
5. Your school and grades matter. Pick the best school you can reasonably afford to go to. The more prestigious, the better the networking effect. Regardless of where you go to school, you need to crush it and make 3.5 GPA or more (really need 3.8+). Not everyone has the opportunity to go to an Ivy League School (I didn't). But show you can hit home runs with the chances you were given. Think about it - if you were in HR at a big bank, and you get 80k applications for 400 seats (those were the true stats for my 2008 Analyst Class) why would you even bother looking at anyone with poor grades? Poor grades are an easy target to miss the first cut.
Bottom line: Work your ass off. Life isn't fair. There are a lot of people who will start ahead of you. Focus on what you can control and give yourself every opportunity to improve. Outwork everyone.
Good Luck.
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