Senior Looking For Advice

Hi monkies,

Hope all of y'all are doing well. It's my first time posting and I wanted to just throw out my question to get as much advice as possible...

I'm a senior in college in Chicago, (not UChicago or Northwestern, sadly) and signed an offer as a portfolio management analyst for a hedge fund in Chicago with roughly ~$100B AUM. It's in their direct investments division so that's something I'm really looking forward to. My goal is to learn as much as possible from an established HF and see if I can manage to open some doors leading into an equity research (or investment analyst) role in a couple years (and hopefully not get let go in the process).

I'm really fortunate and happy to have received this offer and actually feel like it's a good place to learn at, I'm just always trying to see what are the next steps I need to consider for my career.

Some background to help paint my picture a little better...

After my equity research internship last summer I initiated my own coverage group and have built out models and have written my thesis to emulate what I used to do during my internship to still build upon those basic skills as a researcher. The models are pretty good but I'm always tweaking something to make it a little better than before. I try to mimic my thesis/writing to JPM's reports as I always found their thesis to be easily digestible and well written out. I was also a wealth management intern at Goldman my sophomore year, and a TA my entire junior year with a Prof. who used to an MD in ER at Morgan Stanley. (If more info is wanted I can for sure add some in the comments below...) I hope this doesn't come across as corny but I genuinely enjoy being a researcher and creating my own story of a company and see if they are worth investing into or not.

The two questions I have now are:

1) Is there anything I should be doing as my time in undergrad is wrapping up? I'm in the process of creating a blog where I post my models and thesis to show my investments/research approach and hopefully help students who want to 

2) Is going from portfolio management analyst to equity research even a path I can forge on my own? I know it's not impossible but the work itself isn't as established as going from SS ER to BS ER.

Thanks for reading and I appreciate the time you shared with me!