How competitive am I currently? Should I stay local after college?
Just finished freshman year at a non-target in Nashville. 3.8 gpa, corporate finance and accounting double major, treasurer of an organization, investment fund analyst in the yearly challenge (TVA), and am currently in a M&A summer analyst role at a huge insurance company that is buying out smaller shops.
I’ve got two questions here. How competitive am I to start? I’m loving learning M&A and I know this is for me, so no doubt IB or M&A advisory at a consulting firm. I have been networking extensively with IB analysts and interns from my school, and they say I am on the right track and should be good to break in.
Let’s say I do. Do I stay in Nash? It’d be perfect to stay, but is that not a good look? Only small boutique firms here other than Raymond James.
Thoughts?
How non target are we talking? Belmont or a school no one will have heard of?
Regardless, nontargets are really able to break in these days... you are definitely on track. Come soph year you should network aggressively with BB/EB/MM firms, but shoot for the moon and stay local if you strike out. It's not an either/or given the local firms will recruit much, much later
Your career path will have more options if you start at a larger firm in a big city, nothing wrong with staying at a smaller firm but it's a lot harder to move upstream if you start there
Lipscomb actually; my off-campus roomate goes to Belmont! Lipscombs undergrad business program ain’t bad either, ranked 43 in the nation if that even means anything.
Thanks for the advice my man. Hardest part in terms of networking for me is that I love meeting people in person. Feel like I make a much better relationship out of that. How would you go about aggressively networking outside of your city, in a way that doesn’t come off as “I’m literally just using you to hopefully refer me for an internship.” ?
Everyone knows you are just reaching out for an internship. Picture a million salmon in Alaska swimming upstream. You're the salmon. That's how many people are networking for internships.
Unless you go to a handful of schools in NY, most people are not networking in person so just gotta do phone calls and learn to perfect your story and questions. In person is also kind of annoying for the FTs, since meeting someone for coffee takes a lot more time and effort than just hopping into an empty office for a phone call and keeping it to exactly 30 minutes.
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