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I have three close friends who went to three of the best (Fidelity, T Rowe, Capital Group, Wellington) mutual fund shops as pre MBAS associates. I met all of them at business school. One went back to a different top mutual fund group (from one of the above to a different one of the above), another went from one of the above to another high paying, smaller but just as "prestigious" long only (GAMCO, Baron, Harris, Sands, TCI, etc.)  while the other went to a credit hedge fund (and is probably making 1.5-2x as much as an analyst at a top mutual fund).  

 
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I'm a pre-MBA RA at a T1 LO who's looked up exits with my coworkers from firms like ours. These are all rough numbers out of the ~100 people we looked up, but:

  • 1/3 get an MBA (not all M7s)
  • 3/5 stay in some form of buy-side public equities. Within this 3/5 who stay on the buy side, the split is something like
    • 1/3 who exit to a pod/MMHF
    • The other 2/3 end up at an SM or a non-T1 LO. No one we looked up ended up at a T1 LO again (almost always a different one than pre-MBA) unless they went to get an MBA
  • The remainder do something else like IR directly after. I don't recall any going to PE, but it's also almost impossible to do PE unless you have transactional experience with IB

While the person who replied above is right in that T1 LO RAs can achieve great exits by going to an HSWCC MBA, there's probably an element of selection bias there. Out of the people I know (of) in the T1 LOs who applied this most recent cycle, none of them got into their target programs. Maybe they only applied to HSWCC, but that's still surprising considering they got interviews and have arguably great resumes.

That brings me to what's probably the most important factor underlying this: it all depends on the job market, which is pretty tight right now. Going back to the initial stats I cited, many of these moves were probably made when the job market was hotter, especially in 2021-22. In contrast, myself and my peers will get looks and interviews here or there, but no one has been able to convert yet.

 

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