Full-time analyst openings.
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This has to be said plainly, because planning around the wrong assumption costs a year. At most large US banks the great majority of an incoming analyst class is filled from the previous summer's intern cohort, and the full-time process runs to fill what is left: seats where an intern declined, where a group grew, or where somebody dropped out. Firms do not publish the split, so treat any exact percentage you find online as unsourced.

That is not an argument against applying. It is an argument for understanding what you are applying into: a smaller number of seats, opening unpredictably, with far less warning than the summer cycle gives. It is the same shape as the off-cycle problem in other markets, and it has the same answer, which is to be told when a seat appears rather than to check.

Four groups end up here, and they are not all the same. Seniors who interned somewhere else and want to move. Seniors who interned at the right firm and did not convert. Career changers and masters students coming in without a US internship at all. And people coming out of adjacent fields, accounting, valuation, corporate finance, into a first banking seat.

The firms most open to all four are the ones with no fixed calendar. Elite boutiques and middle market banks hire an analyst when a seat opens rather than to a class schedule, so they carry a disproportionate share of the genuinely available full-time seats. Their rows in the table look inconsistent next to the large programs for exactly that reason.

The topics are the ones on /tracker/summer-analyst. The depth is not the same, because you are being hired to do the work in ten weeks rather than to be trained for it.

Capitalize a cost instead of expensing it and the follow-up asks what happens to free cash flow, and then why the valuation moves less than earnings do. Name a deal and you may be asked what the buyer was paying against, why they could outbid the next party, and what would have made you advise against it. That layer resists memorization, because every question is built from the answer you just gave. Being moved briskly to an unrelated topic is a worse sign than being pushed repeatedly on one.

Sponsorship first. Many smaller advisory firms do not sponsor, and they generally say so on the posting rather than at the offer stage. Large banks are more likely to sponsor front-office analyst hires, but it is worth confirming role by role rather than assuming from the firm.

Start date second. A full-time seat filled off-cycle often needs somebody sooner than the standard summer start, which is an advantage if you have already graduated and a problem if you have not. It is a reasonable question to ask on the first call and a bad one to discover at the offer.