Struggling with Experience

First year analyst here and I want to voice my struggle to see if anyone else has been dealing with this. My aim is to recruit for private equity but honestly I’ve gotten little to no exposure. I’ve yet to have opened or set up a VDR or have been on a truly live deal pulling those crazy hours (which while nice for the lifestyle, completely stumps my learning, I get the joke of “haha tell me where you work so I can apply!” but it’s pretty detrimental to your learning if you’re just super relaxed and you don’t really have any live deal experience).


I know I want to do private equity but I would literally have nothing to talk about in interviews, I could take what I’ve been on so far and lie and exaggerate but I’d be scrapping super hard. The worst part is that I’ve actually gotten pretty far in interviews before and got scared because if I DID get the job I have no idea how I’d do because I literally have no tangible experience. I have not modeled, I have not done any thorough due diligence, most I’ve done is send calendar invite, prepare market pages, build case studies on companies or deals and learn email etiquette. It’s not even that I haven’t closed a deal, but that I haven’t even BEEN on a deal and I’m about to be a year in. I also can’t really leave because I wouldn’t exactly be competitive (no experience) and this is definitely not the environment to roll the dice like that, at the end of the day I’m not super stressed out or anything and I’m chilling, but I’m worried that the super relaxed standard this position has set for me has fucked up my baseline of what banking is like and now I’m too soft. I don’t know, anyone else in this position?

For what it counts for, I know how to do the modelling and the case studies and can do all that stuff. But all my exposure / knowledge is theoretical, which makes this frustrating because I also feel like I'm being underused.

 
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