Secondary advisory recruiting out of MBA?

All fair questions. 

On the secondaries advisory side, you'll broadly do two types of deals: LP-leds and GP-leds. There are a lot of nuances to each, but basically LP-leds are where LPs sell portfolios of their fund interests and require an advisor to reach out to potential buyers, help run an auction, and maximize pricing. Given this is a highly commoditized field fees are very low and work for juniors is mind-numbingly boring as you're just a glorified secretary/VDR monkey with the most technical thing you might do running "bid analysis". Requires you to be very organized etc., but you don't get to learn anything about the underlying funds in the portfolio, why each fund is priced the way it is etc. - you just wait for buyers to give their price. 

GP-leds are much more interesting and profitable for advisors, and can be characterized into many subcategories. Basically as an advisor you advise the GP to run a process on one or numerous of its funds. A common example of this is the continuation fund, where a fund is nearing the end of its fund life, has a few assets remaining, and LPs want liquidity. The GP might decide to thus do a continuation fund to effectively create a new fund that purchases the assets in the old fund, with LPs electing to roll or sell in a tender offer. As an advisor you will be responsible for advising on things such as a) the best assets for the GP to put into the transaction b) creating marketing materials and running the auction and tender process c) creating secondary models to determine potential returns and optimal waterfall structures for the GP (to maximize their potential returns/carry). However, you still do not really get to know the assets in-depth as you don't focus on one company like you do in IBD/M&A, and you don't build operational models - secondary models are basically cashflow models that aggregate the expected cashflows from the underlying companies in a fund; the GP gives you the operational models. 

On the buyside, basically the key difference is that as a buyer you dig much more in-depth into the underlying funds/assets, because you actually need to price them. It's thus inherently more interesting as you have skin in the game, and learn a lot more about each of the GPs' portfolios, their strategies, the trajectories of the companies. In concentrated portfolios, you can go really deep into a select number of companies, and think of creative transaction structures etc. to maximize returns for yourself. I personally enjoy the buyside much more as I felt like I am learning much more vs. secondaries advisory. 

I was lucky in being able to move to secondaries PE. Funds are getting bigger, demand for talent is ever-increasing, and secondary funds are becoming increasingly creative/aggressive with their strategies. Thus, having the company-level expertise/technical analysis skills from M&A is more valuable than secondaries advisory, where the buyers know that the advisory juniors do not have the same caliber of technical training/exposure. Most of my contacts in secondaries PE come from traditional M&A backgrounds, but as a secondaries advisory junior if you do a lot of GP-leds, really work on your technical/modelling skills in your own time etc. you can definitely make the move. I made the recommendation to the OP all in all because M&A leads to much more diverse exit ops, and is even more preferred for secondaries buyside, so unless you want to stay in secondaries for life, I don't see the rationale at all in choosing secondaries advisory vs. M&A from an MBA program.

Advisory side pay depends. If you're at EBs like Evercore/PJT Park Hill/Lazard the pay is significantly higher on a cash basis vs. most secondary funds, whilst for BBs like UBS or independent boutiques the pay will likely be in-line. Also of course depends on the secondary fund, but usually the smaller the fund the less you'll get paid. Carry of course can be a huge plus, but given the typical 10% carry that secondary funds charge and the typically smaller MoICs that the secondaries strategy generates, overall carry $ will not be as substantial as Buyout PE