Investment Banking Offer Advice Needed

Hi all, made a similar post earlier, but wanted to provide some more color on my situation and get everyone's thoughts. I have an offer to lateral to a MM IB and begin with the Analyst 1 class in a few weeks. I am coming from an Operations type of role and originally targeted IB to get some finance/deal experience, round that out with my startup experience, and exit to Corp Dev/Strategic Finance/VC in time. 

Now that I finally made it to the finish line, I am feeling incredibly burnt out and honestly do not feel great going into this. Having never worked in IB, I don't really know what to expect but if it's as bad as people make it out to be I don't know if I'm cut out for this sort of thing. I am also not in it for PE or the money, really just to craft this banking + startup story and get a job I actually want to do after. The bank I am going to is supposed to have solid culture compared to the street but I don't know where I will be placed.

I also received a Finance Transformation consulting gig at a Big 4 firm. The Big 4 gig I am looking at is pretty mediocre & honestly irrelevant to what I want to do, but I don't think it'd be too difficult to crush it and move into a Big 4 strategy arm in 1-2 years and then access the Corp Dev/VC/Strategic Finance ops from there if I paint the right story. This path obviously isn't guaranteed, but wanted to get all yall's advice on if you think 6 or 7 months of IB makes more sense or if I should just take the safer Big 4 job & bet on myself to make moves internally + cut from there there.  It's a very safe job hours and stress wise.

IB is objectively the guaranteed path here and I would love to get the skills associated with it and would also love to try it, but I really don't know if I have enough energy or at least drive in this current moment to run it for a full year if I get placed in a shitty group or cover an uninteresting industry. I was thinking if banking is as miserable as it is portrayed to be I make it till January 2023, log the 7 months (2 of which are training), and I find an exit better than Big Four and lock that in for a while. In this scenario, was thinking I could get the 2022-2023 on the resume and as long as I find my next job was thinking I might be okay. Though I see people on here talking about being a slave to their CV and if this would actually be a problem/risk I think I should go do B4 consulting and figure it out from there? As long as I can access the same exits from the other route it might be the way to go, but curious to get some opinions here.

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Also is there a chance that IB could be an easy 9a-10/11pm Mon-Thurs, 9a-7p Friday, and a few hours Sunday as opposed to a 9a-1a Mon-Thursday, 9-9 Friday, and a full Sunday? I think I could fair well in the former and could do a few weeks of the latter but I think if the latter is the standard here I will probably get crushed in this industry.

 

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