I'm a senior at a lower top ten public university with a BA in Economics. This summer, I interned at a long-only equities AM firm. Now I'm back in school, and have interviews coming up this week with two top tier economic consulting firms (think Cornerstone, NERA, Analysis Group, Brattle, Bates White). These firms have excellent MBA placement after spending 2-4 years there- a quick LinkedIn search found that many alumni head to MBA programs like Wharton, Columbia, Booth or Sloan. (Though there's likely a selection effect here in that the alumni who end up not getting into great MBAs opt not to do an MBA at all).
This is what I'm wondering: with a modest amount of undergrad equity research experience, 2-4 years of economic consulting and a top tier MBA with a quantitative focus (Booth's Analytic Finance concentration is particularly appealing), how likely am I to be able to get an investing job on the buy-side upon graduation? I would be interested in macro, long-short, long-only and various flavors of quant strategies.
My long term goal is to end up on the buy-side and I'm trying to figure out if economic consulting is a good opportunity for that purpose, or if I should put more energy into pursuing sell-side ER. Thank you!
Hey man - this was basically my exact career path so feel free to hit me up if you have questions. I did 5 years of Econ consulting at two firms before b-school, probably ended up lingering a bit too long but the financial crisis hit and stalled out the plan for a year or so. Ended up doing Analytic Finance at Booth and recruiting exclusively for buyside research roles. The one difference was that I was pretty exclusively focused on long-only recruiting at that time, but I think the experience if you recruited on the HF side would be pretty similar. If you knock out your CFA (which many Econ consultants do), you'll get tons of interviews. Landing the job is always a bit of a scramble but I think it's a very viable path. I've been running recruiting for my firm at Booth for the past several years, and I find that the former Econ consultants typically have much stronger stock pitches with fewer logical/valuation gaps. The bankers typically come across more polished on average and have a better sense of the landscape, but usually have trouble talking about their stocks for more than 5-10 minutes.
Sellside ER is another really good option but obviously the outlook for that industry is somewhat grim.
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