Moving back to an IB role after a short stint at a Fintech startup

Hi Guys,

Brief background about me: I am 23 years old and from India. Have almost 2 years of work ex. Have done my bachelors in economics from a tier 1 institute. I was at KPMG mid market IB for 1 year. It was a front end role. But I did not get any transaction exposure there and the compensation was not great at all. Which were my motivating factors behind quitting.

Typically my work hours were 8 hours daily on an average. I was mainly helping the team with building teasers and IMs and preparing buyer lists and doing a lot of BD work. I was involved in one transaction towards the latter end of my time there but even in that I wasn’t a part of management meetings and the likes. There was no exposure to modelling work.

So I chose to leave for a job in a fintech startup. Totally unrelated experience to that of any finance field, I worked in sales there. I’ve been here for 7 months and the role has been shit and I’m on the move again.

In the last 7 months I’ve barely worked and I typically averaged on 1 hour of work daily. I’m moving back to an IB, a very big IB with a decent pay. But I’m scared that now I’ll be working 14 hours a day and I don’t feel like I am ready for it. If I think about my KPMG days I get stressed thinking about the occasional long days I had and the stress that came from the shit work culture.

I know for a fact that I don’t want to do IB in the long term but I need advice on how I approach this next step. How do I handle the 80-90 hour work weeks and the shit culture.

I’m just scared of the fact that