Is RA Experience Relevant/Useful to a new Finance Career?
Hi, all,
This is sort of targeted toward those in corporate and big firm finance, especially hiring manager types. For a new college grad, is RA experience relevant?
I'm sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place. I've been selected as an RA this year, which yay, that means free room and board, but the catch is that I can work no more than ten hours per week. They watch us like hawks to ensure we don't break that rule. But paying bills is impossible on ten hours a week. I'm considering withdrawing and working instead. Would I be shooting myself in the foot opting out of the RA experience and chasing a part-time job or a paid internship instead? I have to decide pretty quickly, so all feedback is welcome.
Thanks!
Research Asst Experience (Originally Posted: 09/11/2012)
Have an interview in October for a financial advisory firm which provides stockbroking, asset mgmt services to corporate clients and institutional inv. Employs roughly 500. Having read a lot of the posts here, it seems that in general it looks like this:
Research asst- associate- analyst
However, some (not all) say that research asst is purely admin. The responsibilities for this role, from the firms ad, can be summarized as follows: - Assist in systems issues - Assist in production of research products - Sourcing data/info on companies, indexes etc
Words like 'assist' make me feel that it is a actually an overflow facility and would req more admin tasks than an equities analyst for example.
-BUT, is this experience still decent for someone who doesn't actually want to stay in research, but would like to move into something like 'investment banking analyst' in 2 years or so?? - OR could this position be damaging going forward. As in finding it hard to move out and using it as 'invaluable experience' in interview situations?
Curious as well, (I'm talking with a shop for the same type of position, I'm willing to start over at the bottom of an area I actually like)
Did you mean research asst - analyst - associate?
At my old firm (a mm ib) there were research assistants, they strictly pulled research reports and filings etc. It's a good first job if you are younger, like maybe after your jr year before you try for full time (assuming nothing more substantial pans out). For fulltime, try to use it to move to banking within a year. After that point, hard to parlay it into a legit analyst position. Network.
No. I meant loads of posts on WSO seem to indicate that within a classic research framework analyst is a higher position than associate. Regardless, research assistant is below both. I agree, possibly wouldn't want to be doing a role like this for too long.
In the interview, how do people think about querying some of these issues? There are many nice positions I'd like to move to within the same firm, there will be openings for equity analyst roles etc...
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