MS group rankings (2025)

Work at MS , my thoughts based on what I know. Obviously depends on what you are ranking on (culture? learning experience? exits? actual quality of the group i.e. place on league tables?) so will just go in a random order as I think of them instead of trying to make a ranking. I felt like a tool saying my group was good so have deliberately left that ambiguous.

M&A: everyone knows this one - you will wear a tie every day, you will work until 3am every day, but ofc your technical skills will be fantastic and MFPE exits are top notch. I rarely come across an M&A analyst that doesn't look like they hate their lives, which, again, I think people gunning for the group are aware of. If you know what you're getting into and decide that's what you want, M&A is number 1.

Tech: obviously stronger out west but not entirely clear to me what the split is between Menlo and NY in terms of who covers what. Think both groups are quality, though I believe there's a separate tech M&A / execution team so being a coverage analyst means not a ton of quantitative exposure (at least what I have heard from friends, honestly not entirely sure how that dynamic works). Obviously good software bona fides and have carved out a good niche in Gen AI.

M&C: traditionally ranked high, highly regarded in terms of exits and works on a ton of cool stuff. Tends to be a little sweatier but culture (distinct from WLB!) is good. One of the groups where the mandate has expanded and they now do a really wide variety of stuff, e.g. digital infra is partially run out of comms, some online gambling exposure thru media, I believe there was some involvement alongside tech on the Twitter deal, etc. Would not say execution is done entirely in-house (I understand this used to be the case, now M&A is generally involved in some capacity on modeling-heavy asks), but there is good technical exposure if you're interested in that.

GPUG: Sweatshop from what I have heard, but good technical exposure (though on the niche-ier side). Not sure about culture as I know of a couple people who did the summer there and switched elsewhere. Think exits are generally to infra-related investing, though pivoting to other fields is possible (this is true for pretty much every group at MS, with the caveat that it will obviously be some extra work to study + come up with a reason as to why you want to do something different). I don't know a ton about their market positioning, but based on how hard the analysts get work they can't be doing nothing. Would generally suggest you have an actual interest in infra if you want to go here as I think infra as an asset class if very difficult to work with otherwise.

FIG: Sleeper group imo, do their modeling in-house (I believe). Think culture has gotten better vs. old horror stories, though still a certain air of WASPiness / old-money vibes (I feel like this is just a BB FIG thing). Have heard the word "intellectual" thrown around. Good PE exits, though I think they are heavily tilted to either FIG-related sectors or MFs (who do more financial engineering stuff), so if you are super passionate about operations this might not be the best place for you. Does group-specific placement, meaning they can run their own interview process (I have heard this is much more technical than the MS generalist process).

FSG: I have always (semi-jokingly) heard this referred to as the lifestyle group, which is probably what draws the most interest as opposed to "prestige" - can confirm from what I know that hours are materially lower than other groups (but still e.g. 55-65, just as opposed to groups that average 80+). I think people who self-select here are probably less likely to gun for MFPE, so exits are "worse" in that sense, but seems fairly straightforward to spin sponsors work into PE, and I think there's a strong UMM pipeline there.

Industrials: I sort of think of this as the generic MS IB group - it's a big group, hours are middle of the pack, group is relatively strong, culture is ok, exits are ok, etc. Honestly don't know too much about this group other than it's a standard banking experience and probably sets you up well for most exits (though will have to do more work than e.g. a tech analyst for tech-specific PE).

Real Estate: Another sleeper group, does M&A entirely in-house and advertises itself as being very technical. I have met / worked with a couple of RE analysts who were very, very sharp and could build models on par with M&A. Group itself is very strong and does a ton of varied stuff, including cross-group collab - data center / digital infra is run jointly out of RE and M&C, but have also heard of collabs with HC, industrials, transpo, tech, etc. Exits are obviously generally REPE, but I asked an analyst about this once and he said this is largely selection effect - they also have a strong HF pipeline, which I did not realize, and usually send at least 1 analyst per year to non-RE PE. Like FIG, does group-specific placement, and understand that process is also much more technical than the generalist pool.

HC: well-regarded group within the firm, but also very sweaty - and I understand they do very little execution in-house so I think all that work is PPT / qualitative stuff. If you really like healthcare, that may be an upside - the analysts I talk to honestly sound like PhDs / MDs when talking about HC stuff. But it is a lot of time in PPT, doing research, and building CIMs, and a lot of the work (especially on biotech / drug development) is not super useful outside of the HC space (imho HC skates away by not being thought of as "niche" in the same way as FIG / RE / GPUG but it totally is).

Consumer: I know very little about this group other than the fact that, my year, the analyst class was like 8 girls and 1 guy. Don't really know much about exits but I assume consumer PE. Think hours are middle of the pack, don't really know anything abt culture.

Transpo: small. Think culture is very good and hours are not awful. I know (through a personal interest in the space) that logistics is largely covered out of RE, so think this is mostly planes and trains.

Other groups: shareholder / activism defense is cool if you're into that sort of thing (I have heard one instance each of RE and tech doing activism-related work but I think other groups stay away from it); "Firm Strategy and Execution" is in-house M&A for MS, which seems very cool but I know very little about it; LatAm is obviously a whole different world and I imagine not speaking Spanish is a non-starter.