HF Middle Office Disillusionment

Hi everybody. Posting from a burner for obvious reasons, but I’ve been afraid to seek this advice so early in my career for a number of reasons. To preface, I firmly believe in the idea that entry-level employees are going to have to do things they don’t want to. I’m perfectly fine with this and actually embrace the late nights in the office and think they build resilience. 

I graduated cum laude from a state school in the Mountain West studying Finance and Applied Math. I landed an internship at a top-tier shop (think Millennium, JS, Citadel, SIG, Bridgewater). I was one of the successful few who worked my ass off to a return offer and even turned down a few IB offers during the internship. The hourly pay is better, right? During my internship I was wined and dined and had immense exposure to senior leadership, but now about four months in I leave the office feeling duped on about half of the days. I’m an absolute shitmuncher here. I don’t impact PnL in MO and management sees me as a cost to minimize. I feel constant pressure every day to automate my job or else face the consequences of being fired and left with my $2,700 a month rent bill and go bankrupt with my student loan debt, which bankruptcy sadly wouldn’t even solve. My girlfriend tells me that I don’t make enough money and it genuinely almost made me cry for the first time in years. She didn’t mean it in a devious way, she was simply making a statement. 

My family has been broke my entire life and it’s a goal of mine to retire my parents who starved themselves during the Financial Crisis so that I could even go to this state school. People around me think that I am making big bucks working at this “elite” firm. The reality is $110K base with a variable bonus - one paycheck doesn’t even cover my rent once taxes and health insurance are taken out. I have the finance knowledge and can talk people’s ears off about things that interest me. I believe that I am well-spoken and project my voice well. I had a spontaneous 15-minute conversation with an MD about social security’s long term viability and we discussed feasible alternatives and even how we’d structure the portfolio. I talk about the markets frequently and my colleagues often ask me for advice in these areas. My fear is letting my financial skills atrophy in the button-mashing job that this MO role is. 

At this particular fund it doesn’t seem like there’s the most amount of mobility either. There are a few that have done it and I am trying to make friends with them. Talking about wanting to move to FO doesn’t seem to be much appreciated by management either. I feel that the endless trade reconciliations, being blamed for mistakes that FO makes, and constant pressure to squeeze dollars out of pennies demeaning. I’m lost on whether I should start looking elsewhere or not. My company has an aggressive sign-on bonus clawback policy for the first year that would destroy me financially. I want to make an impact. I want to own something, whether it’s a menial internal process or a book of $1B. I crave the feeling of taking complete ownership over something and having it be entirely my fault if it goes wrong or right. I want to get a PhD here in the city in the next couple of years as well. I love academia (sans bureaucracy) and teaching people in general. I’ve been fighting this internal battle every day and I really just need some help navigating this. If you were in my shoes, would you risk it all here, or try to stick this out? Thank you so much for your thoughts.