1st year Post college: best opps

What are people's thoughts on the following positions: -Blackstone, Kailix Advisors Analyst (Equity L/S) -McKinsey, Corporate Finance Business Analyst -D.E. Shaw, Generalist Associate -Sankaty Advisors (Sounds like they're a debt fund @ Bain Capital) -Blackstone, Corporate Debt Group Analyst (debt hedge fund) -Goldman, IBD -Working for my school's (relatively large) endowment

Worked in IBD (very well reputed grp) last summer and have offer to return, but do not like the lifestyle or people in my group...

If my goal is to get a strong buy-side position 2 yrs down the road, which option is the best? Which option is the most prestigious?

11 Comments
 

http://corporatefinance.mckinsey.com/career/joinmckinseycfs/ourrequirem…

Please don't waste my time or the time of people on the forum with arrogant and uninformed responses.

Are you a sales clerk at Wal-Mart? Though this is a large group of jobs, most that I've listed are buyside, with what I see as two of the most stereotypically prestigious options in banking and consulting. Since I don't know much about how to compare opportunities at various hedge funds with more "classic" routes, it seems like a pretty reasonable group of options to compare.

 
Best Response

The locations I've been to don't recruit at an analyst level. I haven't even met a strictly CF Analyst, since there are so few analysts nationally. You are conflating "groups" in IBD with "practice areas" in consulting. I can be a generalist consultant and do all my work in Corporate Finance if those are the studies I sign up for. Corporate Finance and Private Equity work is open to to everyone at M/B/B (some offices have more work in the area than others, but staffing is generally region invariant) so you can do such work as a BA anywhere. Your designation of such a "Business Analyst" being in an inherently more desirable position than his peers is misinformed.

Yes, it all comes back to "stereotypically prestigious!!" or "what will make me feel like my dick is 10 feet long right after graduation!!"

Evaluating opportunities based on prestigious is juvenile and inefficient, you should be thinking of the industries you want to work in the future, the nature of work in these places, the people who work there and the lifestyle at each location.

The work you'll be doing at D.E. Shaw vs. McKinsey will be VASTLY different, as will the exit opportunities.

These threads are dime a dozen on IBO, one cropping up every week with a bright-eyed, but confused college student asking people to "rank all the IBanks, consulting firms, PE groups and Hedge Funds!"

No-one who actually works in these places will indulge you, so you'll get a variety of misinformed analysis from other college students who have similar aspirations to yours.

 

well, no, not really--if my goal were to just to feel like "my dick were 10' long," I would take the offer I have right now. I think that a large number of college seniors don't know what Sankaty, D.E. Shaw, or Kailix are...but they do know about GS or MS. "Prestige" only matters to me insofar as it creates exit opportunities on the buy-side, particularly in debt or equity L/S hedge funds, where I want to be in 2-3 yrs...

As for the corp finance analyst role--you are right, consultants at Bain & McKinsey do take on corporate finance cases. I spoke on the phone last week with a partner at McKinsey who is a graduate of my college, and with my school's recruiter from McKinsey, and their take was the the role has significantly more corp finance than the std BA role--they target 50% or so of casework in corp fin. So yeah, it is a similar role to being a BA, but slightly differentiated. How would this affect my applying for buy-side roles--this "prestigious" position vs. others that would not make my dick feel 10' long?

 

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