Should I Slow Down?
Hi WSO!
I have a bit of a predicament. I'm currently a first year with ~70 credit hours and can graduate in Fall of 2020 with a few more summer classes and winter classes. I wanted to get your thoughts on this and how going full time usually plays out after something like this. So far, I have been working with a VC for an internship type thing (not sure what to really call it but I do DD on startups), am being paid by a hedge fund while at school to conduct independent research (DD, not financial analysis), and I have an internship set up for Summer of 2020 at a well respected asset manager.
Any advice on how I can go full time at either a MF, HF, or ER after graduating early with a degree in quant econ? thank you!
I want to imagine you are asking this question: Should I put graduation off a little bit in order to get more exposure before I make a job choice?
To that I would just say that if you know what you want to do, making $XX,XXX - $XXX,XXX is better than 0. If you do not know what you want to do, one more internship could be worth it.
If you are not asking that question, I mostly just feel like you are trying to tell us how awesome you are.
MF, HF, and ER are pretty different fields. Even within HF there are multiple directions you could go. I have been looking through resumes to fill an open position at my firm recently, one was from a head hunter, this guy graduated from his bachelors 8 years ago in biology, moved around the country, had 4 different jobs in different fields, got his law degree, then got his MBA and in his most recent position he is making $65,000 base.... I feel bad for him but his resume screams lack of focus. If you could ask the question this way: "I have been interested in HF, MF, or ER but after in depth research, internships, and speaking with professionals in their respective fields, I am disinterested in ER, and MF for these logical reasons and I am going to focus on HF for this logical reason, can someone help me get in touch with headhunters who focus on HF in location XYZ because location XYZ is important to me for these valid reasons.
What I think REPESailor2020 is conveying is that having a convincing focus isn't a "nice to have," it is a "must have."
You won't get a FT offer or be successful in your career unless you both (1) focus on one of those avenues, and (2) be able to explain convincingly to recruiters that you are indeed focused. You have to be able to completely convince HF that you would never ever consider doing a career in ER, or vice versa. That HF is your dream, that you spend your days thinking about HF stuff, that you know exactly what you are getting yourself into, what the day-to-day life looks like, and why you love it so much and can do the job well.
I've explained this on this board before as well, but the #1 most important weed out question that I ask analyst and MBA associate recruits is "Why investment banking / why this bank / why this location?" (basically, why are you here?) So many people come across as unfocused, and more importantly, are not able to sell me that they even know what the job is, much less that they are better able to do the job compared to all the other candidates with whom I'm talking.
In short, I think given your current exploratory phase, you really should slow down and do not graduate early. You have to be able to find your focus area before you graduate or else risk making a big career mistake. Even if you're taking one class a semester, use the rest of your time to dive into recruiting and make sure you're positioning yourself best for the real world ahead. Under no circumstances should you graduate without an offer in hand already.
I'm working on understanding what you're saying. Of course it will very much harm your full time recruiting... it's like the worst possible choice to make.
So basically, typically FT job offers happen after a summer internship. Your first year summer is about to happen, and then you'll have a sophomore year summer, and then you'll graduate the fall thereafter, correct? So in essence you will skip your junior year summer, which is when most people get a full time return offer, and skip your senior year, which is when people that did a junior summer internship and didn't get a return offer recruit for full time.
How do you propose to approach employers that are giving you a sophomore summer internship and convert that to full time? I mean, maybe it could happen, but usually employers are giving sophomore internships with the idea that the person is green and will have a few more years of school afterward to mature, learn more, etc. What made you want to race through school and skip all of the personal friendships, clubs, extra curriculars / hobbies, networking, recruiting, and spreading classes out over time as you grow and mature? It's just a decision that baffles me and really puts you in a "weird guy" category as an employer. You haven't had much time thus far to do anything normal, right? Maybe if you're really recruiting for some super quant fund and they will never put you in front of people, they don't care if you're 20 years old when you start. But most normal finance jobs absolutely will care and it will be something you'll have to have a really good rationale for when recruiting.
Recruiting after you graduate is a really bad idea, you'll lose access to all of the on campus opportunities as well as the internships and jobs that are meant for people currently enrolled in school. You'll be closer to a "lateral" hiring pool. Really would advise against graduating before you have signed a job offer in this economic climate.
It's ok to graduate early ... once you have a job lined up. But right now you're trying to project whether it's a good idea to plan for that right now, and it's not. If you get a full time offer and sign it, feel free to graduate the following semester. But don't race through your classes and be forced to graduate without a job, man. "Converting to full time" needs to happen while you are currently in school, there isn't a standard recruiting pipeline / timeline for people who have already graduated.
You basically need to align expectations with your former / upcoming employers to figure out whether the Sophomore year summer internship has the possibility of coming with a full time offer. If you're tight with the ER and MF people you worked with, ask them literally what their recruiting process looks like and how you could position for a full time job there. If a company wants you back after you did a good job in an internship, they will offer you full time... unless there's something you're not saying like if you're international and nobody will sponsor your visa, at which point I would definitely stay in school as long as possible.
For your long term income it will be better to get the best job at the best firm possible rather than rush into whatever you can get if you graduate early.
Again, just to underline this a thousand times, there is little to no full time finance recruiting process that happens after you graduate from college. By then finance firms are working on who's going to be next year's summer intern that will get a full time offer for two years after that.
Just asking, but are you at a super non-target school? I would be surprised that your classmates in the same major / also going into HF / ER etc. wouldn't be in a good position to give you this advice. Have you discussed it with other students who have already been through the FT recruiting process at your school? If you are at a non-target with nobody else going into finance, it might be worth graduating early and doing MSF at a target program so that you're in that recruiting pool.