Hey y'all, I have just quit my asset management job of 2 years (mostly doing equity research work) and will be starting at big4 TAS (Transaction Advisory Services) in September as I look to make the switch into IB/PE further down the road (2/3 years later).
So far, I have the following ideas of what to do in the next 9 months, I would love to hear everyone else ideas:
- Move to Mexico/South America to do a Spanish language course and aim to become conversationally fluent.
- Travel through India, as have some friend travelling there and have never experienced life in a 3rd world country.
- Hike the Pacific Coastal Trial with a friend who is doing it (I would probably only want to do 500 miles out of the whole route of 2,600 miles)
- Move to a cheap developing country and learn how to code / build own projects. I have some coding experience and have some projects I want to work on in fintech and digital advertising.
- Stay in London and try to find a 6 month internship in an area I find super interesting (VC / ecommerce / digital advertising) but not necessarily related to IB/PE path I am aiming for in the future.
- Do a 6 month internship / full-time work in a foreign country (I am speaking to some startups in Philippines currently)
I managed to save enough money to be able to live in a low-cost developing country for all of that time if I stayed in London or any high cost city I would need to work, any other interesting ideas out there?
What would you do with 9 months free time?
p.s I am single and just turned 24 years old!
Cheers
1.) I would travel, fuck the internship (although the Phillipines startup idea sounds interesting). I am partial to Mexico/South America, I think you'd enjoy that experience more than India. And tbh Mexico is not far from a 3rd world country.
2.) Why tf did you quit your job as an ER analyst on the buyside for TAS!?
1) yeah defo leaning more towards Mexico/ South America trying to learn Spanish and surfing as much as I can.
2) Left because it was in a super niche area with little to none progression and a lot of the work was sales/marketing our fund rather than actually doing fundamental ER. It was essentially a start up fund.
Did a solid 4/5 months interviewing and all of the Corp Dev / Strategy roles I was applying for wanted transaction based work experience so either IB or TAS. Given I'm 2 years out of college, IB analyst route was pretty much shut so decided on Big 4 TAS. Do the ACA exams for 2/3 years and try and work on a range of industry verticals. I'm based in London and the jump from TAS to IB / Corp Dev / PE (mid-market and lmm) is a lot more common than in the States I think.
Yeah obviously not ideal as I'm kinda starting again from scratch and feel like I'm behind most of my peers but hopefully should play out better in the long term