Do I need an advanced degree for breaking into healthcare buyside?
I'm a freshman at H interested in healthcare HFs. Do I need the MD/MBA to break into healthcare buyside? What are the future prospects of healthcare investing compared to other industries?
Just this past week spent about an hour talking to an alum at a Healthcare MM team. No advanced degree, but this person did start in Healthcare IB.
Healthcare PM here. It's much easier for anything healthcare outside of therapeutics. You won't be negatively differentiated if you apply for medtech, HCIT, tools & diagnostics, or services. However, in biotech, it will be very challenging. Copying from another thread as it relates to biotech:
It's extremely hard to get an interview at decent+ investment funds specializing in biotech without a doctorate at this point. It is not impossible, but it will require some exceptional pedigree outside of academia and/or reputation, connections, or luck to break-in otherwise.
The exception is Oleg at EcoR1, who goes out of his way to recruit non-doctorates to his investment team. His fund's performance is very good, and he has demonstrated the ability to readily adapt to market conditions and predict macro/fund flows better than most other PMs I've seen.
Having a doctorate may help you do diligence, but it's by far and away not necessary and certainly not sufficient to be a good biotech investor particularly in the public markets. Intellectual curiosity, grit/tenacity, and a genuine love for the markets and a desire to "win" go much further than having specialized knowledge in a very niche aspect of a biological pathway, in my opinion. The subject matter is not the value of a Ph.D. program, but the exercise of going very "deep" into one area and performing exhaustive research/being skeptical of everything you read is very valuable. Some people need a Ph.D. program to hone this skill, and some develop it naturally without it. At the end of the day, I'm indifferent on which path one chooses provided the outcome is the same.
I know many would disagree with this viewpoint, and then there is the entirely separate practical matter of filtering candidates based on degrees vs. interviewing all the candidates who don't have Ph.Ds/MDs.
FWIW this opinion is coming from someone who spent the time and money to go through a doctorate themselves...
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