how to get into business

Take Level 1 of the CFA examinations when you are allowed to (last year of college). It helped me get into ER.

In order to prepare yourself for ER, I recommend that you resign yourself to the reality that there will be zero decent exit opportunities from that dept. You certainly won't be lateraling into any prestigious hedge funds or anything like that. Basically, you should treat it as a shit job to kill time between now and your MBA.

http://www.drmarkklein.blogspot.com/

Mark,

What would be the least worst exit opportunities for ER then?

The only exit opps are down. Down to the back office. Down to the retail side. There is no "up" in equity research. The best you can do is hold onto your job for dear life and hope you get into business school before they start paying them even less than they do today - they're already considered a cost center.

http://www.drmarkklein.blogspot.com/

I exited sell-side research to buy-side. I could imagine hedgies could be an option too. I have also heard some are climbing up the sales&trading corporate ladder. Not sure where should I progress next, any pointers?

I'll have to agree though, that buy-side research doesn't offer a lot of value at the moment.

Read some on Klein's posts, hes a douche.

exit options I have are prop trading, hedge funds, the buy-side in general and corp finance.

I left equity research to work in PE/LBO. Had interviews at several of the large-cap hedge funds before deciding that public equity wasn't my thing anymore. My guess is that either "mark klen md" couldn't hack it in finance, or should just stick to topics that he's knowledgeable about (obviously finance and medicine are not among them).

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generally, how long out of undergrad would one have to remain on the sell-side of ER for a move to the buy-side (notably prop trading or hedge funds) to become feasible?

this depends on you. Sell-side research involves learning your industry under coverage extremely well and building relationships with buy-side clients. How you leverage these will determine when you make the jump from sell-side to buy-side.