Corporate Finance - questions

isa,

Corporate finance could span many different roles across different divisions within a company. You could be in audit or in the controllers group, which is more accounting than finance or you could end up in the treasury department where you will do capital budgeting and more of the NPV/IRR stuff that you will learn in B-school. There are also other roles like commodity trading, forex management etc, and function definitions will vary across companies. Rotation programs can be within different divisions of the finance org, or in the same role within different business units of the company. So, in a nutshell, there isn't a typical corp.finance role.

Recruiting, again, can be to a specific position(more common) or to a rotational program(less common). A finance concentration and solid recruiting is usually good enough provided you take the corp finance role seriously and are not trying to find a poor substitute to IB. Recruiters are wary of this and will see through you easily. Finally, I dont know if it is a less desirable career, but there are good and bad corp finance jobs. Depends on whether the company treats finance as a purely supporting function or as an equal and integral partner in the decision making process.