Investment role at a pension/endowment

From what I've seen and personally experienced, pension funds and top endowments tend to be quite competitive and pedigreed. I assume here you are speaking of asset allocation / manager selection types of jobs and not direct investing inside these organisations. Asset allocation at these places seems to me as interesting, but less volatile career (in a good sense), which some people move into from active mgmt mostly due to lifestyle reasons.

Something to note is that a move from direct active to asset allocation seems doable, but not the other way around. As a result the typical career path would be just moving up - associate to director to MD to CIO. There's a market for these people and lateraling to another E&F or family office is not uncommon. In fact because people hardly ever leave, this tends to be the typical way up.

I'd say getting into one of the top pension funds / endowments is just as hard if not harder from a qualification perspective than direct investing. In many respects I'd say HF/AM is easier also because there are just more openings and pretty structured recruiting processes. Maybe you could spin your background into someone who is capable of doing operational DD, but not sure how much do these places care about that aspect unless it's for some sort of emerging managers program. On a side note, I don't think HF/AM job is out of reach for your profile if you manage to get into a competitive MBA. What's competitive? For HF/AM internship super days I'd routinely see people from HSW, Booth, Columbia, less but still visible - Sloan and Kellogg. Good luck and feel free to reach out if you had other questions.