By Shawn D. Card

KeyBanc Capital Markets is the institutional banking division of KeyCorp (KEY ), the nation's 10th-largest bank holding company. I received an offer to join the Mergers & Acquisitions group in Cleveland several months before graduating from the Tuck School of Business.

As an associate, I focus on buy-side and sell-side merger and acquisition transactions, corporate divestitures, and financial advisory assignments for public and private companies across a wide range of industries. My job responsibilities include creating PowerPoint presentations (pitch materials and management presentations), financial modeling, creating large Word documents used to describe businesses we are selling or raising financing for (offering memoranda), and directing the work of several analysts.

In my daily work, I report to vice-presidents, directors, and managing directors. Projects are never staffed exactly the same, so on any given project, I can report to any of the senior bankers in my group.

I made the decision to go to business school because I felt it would provide a great network for me to call upon in the future. B-school is also a great way to make a transition to a new career. Prior to attending Tuck, I served as a senior financial consultant at Wells Fargo (WFC ). Before that, I was an associate financial consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers in the Financial Advisory Services group.

I knew I wanted to get into private equity and felt that going to B-school would help me position myself to make the transition eventually into that field. The skill sets I am learning as an investment banker in the M&A group are directly transferable to the types of skills I will need once I make the transition into private equity.

At first, I was extremely apprehensive about moving to Cleveland and unsure KeyBanc was the right place for me. Despite my apprehension, I took a leap of faith, knowing with great risks come great reward.

There were three main reasons I accepted the offer to join the M&A group at KeyBanc: the high likelihood I would receive a richer experience than I would have at a bulge bracket firm; the potential for a better work-life balance; and the opportunity to work with a group of people I felt I would enjoy being with on a daily basis. Thus far I have been happy with my decision. I am learning a great deal about my field of work, getting great transaction experience, and working with some wonderful people.

Here's a typical day in my life:

7:30 a.m.—I'm up and out the door to take Bob the bulldog for his morning walk.

7:45 a.m.—My favorite part of the day: My 5-month-old daughter Madison wakes up, and I spend the next half hour playing with her. I make it a point to spend time with Madison in the morning, because she is usually down for the night when I get home from work.

8:45 a.m.—I start my morning commute…on foot. My wife and I live in the Warehouse district of Cleveland, which is just three blocks from my office. I use my walk to work as an opportunity to gather my thoughts and begin to organize my day.

9 a.m.—I check my voice mail. A woman from an organization that assists nonprofits is trying to place me on a board of directors of a local nonprofit. I am glad she left me a message, because I have finally narrowed down the list of boards I am interested in. I call her back, and we talk about the next steps in the process.

9:15 a.m.—I take a quick glance at The Wall Street Journal to make sure I am up on the big business news of the day.

9:30 a.m.—A short meeting with a vice-president to fill him in on the status of a going-private pitch we are working on. I take him through some analysis I have done that I think demonstrates clearly why management should take the company private.

11:30 a.m.—A client meeting to go through the first draft of a sell-side offering memorandum we put together. I put a lot of work into presenting the material in a fashion I was told the client likes. Luckily, the client appeared happy, and we discuss some minor changes to highlight some new products the company has recently introduced.

1 p.m.—Lunch with a couple of my co-workers. I usually try to get out of the office for lunch. The weather is great, and it is nice to spend at least 45 minutes enjoying it since I surely won't be leaving the office at a time that will allow me to enjoy it later in the evening.

2 p.m.—I check in with my analysts and give them guidance on some new things I would like them to work on. We have a great group of analysts in the M&A group, so I am usually happy with the work they produce.

2:30 p.m.—I receive a call from a client we are advising on the acquisition of a group of pizza franchises. The deal is pretty small, but it is very exciting for me because I am the lead M&A banker on this transaction. It has been a great learning experience for me.

The client and I talk about the Letter of Intent (LOI) and the correct working capital number to include in the LOI. We also nail down a time for a due diligence meeting with the current COO of the franchises and the private equity group that is selling them.

3:30 p.m.—I give my assistant the details of my meeting plans so she can set up flight, hotel, and car arrangements for my due-diligence meeting in a couple of days. She calls back with some good news. I have been bumped up to first class because I have reached silver status on Continental (CAL ). Nice!

4:30 p.m.—Time to crank through some work. I have to complete and check an analysis I have been working on for an upcoming pitch. The company we are pitching is a major player in a market that is not very large ($900 million total market size). Additionally, the market is growing at a fairly slow pace. We are trying to redefine the market to show there is a much larger addressable market for the company.

7:00 p.m.—Dinner time! The analysts walk by and take dinner orders. It is a much-appreciated sight because I am starving!

7:45 p.m.—Grub arrives. We all take a little time away from our computers to eat and crack a few jokes. It's always nice to lighten things up and poke fun at one another.

8:30 p.m.—I head to a conference room with an analyst to draft up the main concepts we want to get across in a pitch we have coming in the next couple of weeks.

9:30 p.m.—I take a little break to check e-mail, catch up with the news online, and check out the available tee times to play golf on Sunday morning.

10:00 p.m—I leave a voice mail for one of my managing directors on the progress of my pizza deal.

10:15 p.m.—Back to work, putting some slides together on the upcoming pitch the analyst and I drafted a couple of hours earlier.

12:30 a.m.—After one last check-in with my analyst, it's time to head home. If I'm lucky, my wife will be awake to tell me all about the day that she and Madison had and what new things Madison learned to do today.

There are several downsides to working in investment banking. For one, the hours can be grueling. It's common for junior-level bankers to work more than 110 hours a week (although my hours are more in the 80-to-90 range). I knew when I started that I would not have much time to spend with my family. I went into this with my eyes wide open and made sure my wife was also prepared to deal with the fact that I would not be home much.

Another downside of investment banking is that some of the personalities one must deal with can be very tough. You have to have thick skin.

However, with the downside comes a tremendous upside. Pay can be exceptionally high (although pay is barely minimum wage if you calculate it on an hourly basis) when compared to other careers. An additional benefit of working in investment banking is the high level of exposure one receives. I work closely with many senior-level executives, and I enjoy the fact that the work I do has a high impact on the business decisions of CEOs, CFOs, and owners of big businesses. I also like the fact that no day is quite the same as the day I had yesterday.

TRY NEW THINGS. My course work at Tuck prepared me well for the type of work I do, so I had an understanding of what my job entailed the first day I started. Classes in corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, corporate valuations, corporate restructurings, financial statement interpretation and analysis, statistics, and decision science (to name a few) prepared me to create financial models, review the financial models that my analysts create, and conduct in-depth quantitative analysis.

Other classes such as strategy, analysis for general managers, and operations helped me learn frameworks I could use to analyze companies from a strategic, operational, and financial standpoint. Further, classes such as management communication and my Tuck forum project, along with the numerous opportunities Tuck provided me to interact with high-level executives, prepared me for the interaction I have with them on a daily basis.

My advice for MBA students is to use business school as a way to try new things. Branch out, and hang out with people who you normally would not. Take an internship doing something that might be very different from what you think you want to do. Get to know your professors and make sure they know you. You would be surprised to find out how many people get their dream jobs because of a professor's recommendation: Just two weeks ago one of my professors contacted me to gauge my interest in a job he thought would be of interest to me.