In Need of Short Term Career Advice

I'm a sophomore (Top Target, 3.8+ GPA) going into recruiting next semester, I'm in dire need of some tips on how I should go about my career options. 

This past summer I worked at a cool energy trading internship where I had a good deal of exposure to derivatives pricing and electricity power markets (very unstructured internship but learned so much). Most of the guys there were ex-BB-structuring desk or quant guys who told me a lot of stories about their "trading" days, all of which sounded really fun and stimulating but it seemed more or less too disconnected from markets and fundamentals (drivers, differentiated views, etc.), which is what really intrigued me the most about finance (at least from what I've been doing at my uni's investment club). It may have been because electricity is in and of itself super niche, but from the stories they were telling me the job was more or less math / ML / data science work specific to power. 

I wanted something a bit more in touch with markets on a daily basis. A few months before that internship I was interviewing for BB S&T internships for sophomore summer and luckily managed to land one in their FICC division and was so sure this was the path for me. After talking to more and more S&T people, however, I'm starting to realize SnT's limited exit opps hence my decision to shift to the traditional 2+2 IB M&A/Lev-Fin -> PE track when recruiting for junior summer, mainly for insurance so that I don't get pigeonholed.

As an end goal, SM/MM L/S Equities sounds the most interesting to me as of right now. It seems like it most aligns with my interests in investing and fundamentals; risk management, researching trade strategies from differentiated views, and client meetings all interest me a great deal and I feel like a PM, merges these skills all together. I'm looking for a long-term career that is stimulating and without the ridiculous hours of IB/PE and would love to skip that track if at all possible. I've been working part-time at a mid-market investment bank this semester and I honestly don't think I have it in me to sacrifice everything for my job to be on constant standby with endless deal flow. If I had the choice, I would pursue the S&T (out of undergrad) --> L/S Equity HF route but not sure how common/feasible that is. 

Broadly speaking I'm aware that Citadel (CAP) and Point72 (P72 Academy) have L/S equity "training programs" right out of undergrad, with a few other funds with more quant-heavy internships as well. I'm really not sure what the traditional path to HFs are, if there even is one. Are there any other structured internships that serve as a pipeline out of undergrad? Please let me know if I'm getting this all wrong. The plethora of paths I could take paired with the overwhelming time crunch with recruiting has been spreading me too thin with self-imposed stress. Thank you, any input would be greatly appreciated. I apologize if I sound at all pretentious. 

2 Comments
 
Most Helpful

Millennium, Point72, Citadel have structured graduate programs (last 2 also have internships) and are probably the only MMs definitely worth taking over anything else if you want HF.

You can do an internship in IB/ER and recruit ft for the aforementioned schemes. I and a few people I know successfully did this but realistically you’ll need to prep for these in your own time since nothing you learn on your IB/ER SA will really help outside of basic technicals.

S&T -> L/S isn’t really a thing 

 

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