I'm a current business school student at an M7 (one of the perennially top ones, if that contributes) who intended to go through MBB recruiting, didn't take networking sufficiently seriously for my demographic, ended up with just one first round interview, got a final, but got dinged.
Subsequently I took the throw-shit-at-the-wall approach, and mysteriously / virtually miraculously landed offers at D.E. Shaw and Bridgewater. For D.E. Shaw, it's as a generalist (in either corp dev, macroeconomic research, or office of the COO - my choice to be sorted; suffice it to say, I'm not going to be a quant or a trader); for Bridgewater, senior management associate. The purists on this forum may be retching right now; please bear with me, as I'm a total f****ing n00b and need your sage advice even though I won't be "front office".
I feel more irrationally attached to the D.E. Shaw role because the interview was more technically strenuous (drawing binary trees, some moderately difficult probability and discrete math) whereas Bridgewater seemed totally satisfied to simply probe my subconscious. Fine.
What I want to know is: 1) what do people here actually know of and think of these sorts of roles, even at traditionally otherwise elite firms? Is their skill development transferable to roles in other industries, as MBB consulting allegedly is?
2) If I had to accept one, even for only the summer, which should I accept - especially if I were interested in re-recruiting for MBB full time in the fall?
3) It seems D.E. Shaw's generalist program may be better regarded, at least by virtue of selectivity, than Bridgewater's senior management associate internship. Is there any truth to that? Would it matter for development or exit opps?
Thanks for any help on this... these programs lack a ton of discussion.
I've become far too identifiable for my liking, so I will probably stop posting here soon, but let me provide a curtailed answer. There is woefully little information about DE Shaw's interview process on the interwebs, and hopefully this illuminates some dark corner of the firm's process (which is byzantine as fuck).
Office of the COO was one of the teams I was selected for at DE Shaw (they conditionally select successful interview candidates for a short list of teams, market your resume to different team leads, and then match the candidate to a team). My impression of the team's work is that it is banal: corporate strategy for a hedge fund, which could include organizational, process, or implementation strategy for a variety of functions. The details remained veiled to me even after I completed recruiting. The staff is extraordinary: natural science PhDs from Stanford, Cambridge, Harvard, etc. Nevertheless, this seems less indicative of the work's difficulty or appeal, than the rarefied market conditions (consider it the secondary or tertiary value driver of the wall street brain drain to front office roles - even back office can become elite and lucrative, for no direct functional purpose other than brand and other weird tragedies of labor markets). I had personal reasons to neglect the offer. Most of them were tactical risk aversion that had nothing to do with the work: - They told me I would be one of the ~3 MBA internship class they average every summer. Red flag that developmental and learning opportunities would be slanted towards team function and role, probably unstructured, with fewer networking opportunities, and most importantly, less relevant to my generalist skill-set (this was somewhat validated by other employees, who indicated that the firm poured resources into career development but typically in narrow and highly technical capacities). I am a former data analyst interested in strategy, and this was not a tension I wanted to have to manage. - Questionable exit opps. Yes, DES is renowned in its industry. But the credential means very little outside of that space (same goes for Bridgewater, but at least BW gives you something tangible - immersion in its philosophical bootcamp, a vastly larger MBA class, interview fodder for years). There are scant opportunities to take "random walks" at DES, although the Office of the COO role is billed as something close to a generalist role. But even this will not provide the same breadth of exit opp you'd get at MBB, or probably even a lower tier management consulting firm. And finally, the generalist credential at DES probably isn't exportable even within the asset management industry, simply because the actual marketable background would be a quantitative or finance role. - Caveat: they'll probably pay you >= $200-$250k range. In part to compensate you for compromising other incentives, I imagine.
Again, these were tangential to the role. If back-office strategy in asset management is your one true calling, this is a great job (though BW may still be better, if you can tolerate it).