Non-Target Looking For Boutiques For Junior Year

Hi,

So basically, I'm about to be a junior at a non-target, and I was wondering if there are any boutiques (first choice is the west coast, but I'll move to Arkansas if I have to) that are friendly toward non-target people. I've kind of messed up these first couple of years, and the result is that I have TERRIBLE work experience and blah ECs thus far which, coupled with my non-target background, will make it almost impossible to land a BB for next summer. Therefore, I am wondering if there are any boutiques that are more open toward non-targets that I can work at next summer to start my career, and after that, I'll pray that I can take advantage of the opportunity and take off from there. The one good thing is that my GPA is OK (3.85+), so I guess I didn't completely fuck things up.

So do you guys know of any in mind/have any advice for someone in my predicament? Btw, long term, I'm not looking at megafund PE but rather would ideally like to hold a high managerial position at a large/megacap company in India and do business over there (or else work in PE, not necessarily at the KKRs of the world in India). I'm not sure if that's relevant, but I thought any information may be helpful, so there it is.

Thanks in advance!

3 Comments
 
Best Response

Somewhere on here is a thread with lists of banks pulled from CapIQ. Find that and do some Google searches for banks in the area you want to go to / area they specialize in. Botiques and MMs almost always have bios for their upper people, and in a lot of cases, the whole team. Target people at the firm that you have something common with (same school, travel experience, the list goes on, but basically somebody you can at least relate to a little) and cold call/email them. If you have a solid story about yourself you can get people to pay attention to you. Expect to get ignored and hear "fuck you" a lot, but if you work at it hard enough, you should be able to land something. This is heavily dependent, though, on you not being a fucking boring person. So if you think your ECs are blah, then get involved in things that are not so blah.

Most people at smaller firms don't know / don't give a shit about "target" schools. Your ability to tell a compelling story about yourself and ability to show you know what the business is about and you can do the work speaks a hundred times louder than what brand of school you purchased.

 

Cold calling/emailing is probably one of the few choices you have. If you have access to an alumni database, try searching through it for alumni contacts that are in IB, whether it be a boutique/BB firm.

 

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