Career Advice For Soon-to-be-Graduate with AM Experience

Hi all, I just got some unfortunate news from my summer internship and am hoping for some good advice. Appreciate whatever input you have.

Here's the situation: I interned at one of the offices of a long-only equities asset management firm with over $100 billion AUM. The internship went well in that my boss liked me, and so did the head portfolio manager for the office I was at- both strongly supported my getting a full-time offer from the firm as a Research Associate (which would have been a little unusual coming out of undergrad, but not unheard of). Unfortunately, the home office shot them down, saying that now is not a good time for the firm to hire anyone, let alone someone fresh out of undergrad. I found this out a couple days ago.

This was obviously quite disappointing, especially since one of my takeaways from the internship is that I would love to be a professional investor. Thinking in a long-term oriented, probabilistic way comes naturally to me, and I'm happy to spend much of my day reading and synthesizing information. But what's done is done, and now I'm trying to figure out how to land smoothly so that I have a good job lined up when I leave school. My boss and his boss are both helping me with my search, but have also told me that there is a limit to their influence and that buy-side research positions are very competitive. (Though of course they will both be fantastic references).

Here's the rest of my background: I'm graduating this semester from a lower top 10 public university with a BA in Economics and a 3.75 GPA. Aside from the AM internship, I have some work experience in engineering and sell-side ER. I know that I've likely missed the boat on Bulge Bracket recruiting (and besides, IBD never really appealed to me anyway), but if my ultimate goal is to end up on the buy-side in a research role (either equities, multi asset strats or alternatives), what sort of opportunities should I be pursuing right now, and more importantly, what would be the best way to go about that? I feel like blasting my resume at eFinancialCareers and cold-messaging people on LinkedIn has to be less than optimal.

Thanks so much for your help.

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