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.
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.
I don’t think it would be consistent 90 hour weeks (especially in this market) but also would expect to be done by 10pm on a regular basis (not including training time)
You think after training logging off most nights at 10pm is pretty reasonable to assume? First two months will be pretty mellow with training then will hit the desk
Anyone have any comments on this? Appreciate anything anyone might have to say on this so I don't make the wrong choice
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So you think a July to January stint won't ruin my CV if I get into a sweaty group? Part of me wants to try it but also don't want to fall on my face. As an A1 do you have an average of how bad the hours are? I know it's team/bank specific but having never done this before it's hard to visualize how bad this actually is
Just go the big 4 route since you said you don’t care about money.
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