Which one is better for the long run?

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Nevermind I suppose the bonuses will be at least 30% base if not much more. That's good numbers for MidWest. Just saw the salaries and was like "damn".

RJ0225:

Yeah, it's entry level in the midwest. :(

They're still exceptionally low for a post MBA with experience. Shouldn't you be going for more of an associate level position?

To be honest with you, all of those positions will be tough to break into PE. Depending on what the bank debt role actually is (Debt Capital-what's that? debt capital markets?), you may be able to get into a debt or mezz fund; however, if you're working on leveraged debt deals financing PE acquisitions you may have a shot at pure PE, but I'd gamble to say that if you're in a midwest city outside of Chicago with a Euro bank (not the HQ, or NYC, Chicago) you're most likely doing more straight lending deals (although the DCM thing may lend to other exits, typically not PE but you never know). If you're in Chicago you may be able to take this position, work it for a couple of years and try to get yourself into a leveraged finance role and eventually try for PE, but at that point you'd be getting a little older and it would be difficult to get yourself onto a partner track in PE. There's nothing wrong with a mezz fund though. They're an interesting beast and you typically get to invest up and down the capital stack more than PE (mezz funds almost always want warrants and often will put in a small piece of pure equity), you don't control the investment (most of the time a PE fund does, sometimes it's a non-sponsored company) and that frees you up to do more deals annually.

HF and PE investing are very different beasts and I can't really think of people going from one to the other. Leaving aside the HF's that invest in private companies or do PE deals, and I think that has become much less common post 08, the styles don't translate well. I'm in PE. My outlook for investing is a 5-7 year timeframe (a short investment would be 3 years). While I'm sure there are exceptions, I don't think many hedge fund would ever hold something for 3 years. PE typically also does control investments and take over an entire company and operate it privately. That's just not what the typical hedge fund does. It's a different way of looking at companies. HF's typically invest in publicly traded equity, or at least debt, derivatives, etc that has at least a somewhat liquid market. PE typically acquires companies with very little liquidity outside of selling the entire thing and is essentially a deal machine. Yes, there's some operational involvement but it's typically less than most people imagine it is and is at the Board/Advisory level, not roll your sleeves up and actually work at a company. This all is not to say the HF isn't your best option, but it's not likely to lead to PE, especially if you don't have IB experience pre-HF.

Corp development/strategy roles are typically an exit for IB and PE. I've seen a couple of guys go from CD back into PE, but the key word is "back." I may be off on this though as I'm the least familiar with this, I'm basing this completely off of what I've seen, and I operate in the lower MM to MM PE, and typically in more boring industries and businesses. Maybe a top Google corp development guy can make the leap into a tech focused PE fund, but I'd still imagine he'd have IB/PE experience prior to the CD gig at Google. Financing an acquisition as a PE investor is very different than having a balance sheet or the ability to offer shares like Google can and you typically analyze acquisitions differently at a PE fund than you do at an operating company (although you do bolt-on acquisitions for platform co's all the time in PE but you still can't offer shares to finance the acquisition).

There are exceptions to everything I've said above but if you're looking at the typical and traditional ways to get into PE, you'll have to get really creative. But, if your interest is in the Wall Street style financial world, go for the hedge fund.