Help with decision

I have SA 2019 offers from a MM bank ( think Wells, BNP,RBC, Nomura) for IB and offers from 3 top BBs ( think MS, JPM, GS) for S&T. Ultimate goal is possibly banking . Any advice? Any strong pick for S&T? Thanks.

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Congrats on the offers. If your ultimate goal is IBD, you should sign with the MM bank. Lateraling internally from S&T to IBD is not easy, so you'd probably have to go through full time recruiting which is a crap shoot/coin flip and 100x harder than summer analyst recruiting.

The fact that it's a MM bank and not a BB might bother you, especially considering that undergrads/this forum have a hard on for prestige. But in reality, you'll be getting paid the same amount of money to do the same work, and as long as you perform well, exit opps are the same for the most part. Additionally, there's a lot of benefits for working for a MM bank-- teams are leaner/flexible, upward mobility is faster/easier, and you can take on more responsibility. I personally prefer this.

For S&T, GS JPM and MS all have great trading floors. However, depending on what you want to trade, one might be marginally better than the others.

 

If you are feeling confident about your interviewing abilities, another option is to wait for the regular recruiting cycle (July/August) to interview for BB IBD. Given that you've already received pretty great offers, I assume that you probably have a good foundation for interviewing.

High risk, high return.

 

Well I would assume that you pursued S&T at the BBs since you have S&T offers from three of them even though that's seemingly not really what you want to do and they are unlikely to give you offers elsewhere in the bank with an outstanding offer in one division so if you want to risk it and try to get a BB IB offer you'll need to be realistic about what banks are left.

I agree with the MM thought - as lateralling is high stress and mobility is a lot harder than it is often made out to be.

 

So you would accept at the MM bank and try to lateral later? It is a hard call as we have to decide before actually going through the experience of an internship for either IB or SnT. Given the accelerated recruiting this year, there will be almost no FT options to apply to if I change my mind about the division after an internship experience. I am doing an IB internship this summer so next year I can build on it or decide to take the S n T offer and experience something else.

 

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