Hello WSO!
I'm in my last semester of my B.A (Hons) Business Economics from University Of Delhi. And here is how my story goes. :p
I have noticed on my fairly decent amount of browsing of this great forum that there's barely any info on the Indian scene regarding CF, M&A, PE etc! I'm not surprised but I guess it's time it starts building up and hope alot of doubts in the minds of students (ranging from undergrad to mba,CFA,ca etc) in India in the future can be cleared up through such a medium!
First and foremost, the sad thing in India is that undergrads are not valued much in this field. Joining a PE or an IB is considered a very far fetched dream irrespective of your capabilities and credentials. (Unless your daddý's the chairman or you're those 2 kids in a country of a billion who nailed it somehow.) Now certainly just because the possibilities are bleak, my interests aren't going to change.
Now, here's my catch 22 situation. If I want a good MBA I need some good work ex. But in India if I want good work ex IN THE FIELD I'M INTERESTED IN, the situation above shows its not going to happen. So what can I do now? After some research, networking and lots of discussions I've realised the closest work I can get to these lines could be in the TS/TAS divisions of the BIG 4. And even there it's not going to be easy to get placed, but if I do get an opportunity in the coming weeks/months I want to be more well prepared in terms of knowing what I'm getting into. So mostly these divisions are divided into teams like Lead Advisory, Due Dilegence, Valuations etc.
I was wanting to know which kind of a team would I get to learn the maximum. I'm pretty sure not Due Dilegence and that anyway seems the most monotonous. I wanted to specifically know what kind of work would an Analyst do in Lead Advisory and Valutions. I'm aiming for EY as the leaguetables of mergermarket show they have the maximum number of deals. Low in value but High in learning for a newbie ;)
Any reviews on how close these fields are compared to the real IB world and whether such work ex would be valued post MBA if I wanted to break into a bulge bracket then?
I have an interview with S&P Capital IQ day after to be Research Associate. But those kind of jobs are going to be my last resort. Last thing I want to do is sit and do Data Mining all day all night for months :(
Cheers!
when you refer to these league tables, are you just talking about within india? cause i didn't know EY was at the top
Yes ... you can google "mergermarket India M&A Round-up 2012" and the pdf will come up. its leader by deal count, not even close in deal value though!
Deciding your target job on the basis of deal count is, frankly, stupid. A better idea would be to try and reach out to some of the analysts working there and get their opinion on how many deals they actually work on and more importantly, what responsibilities they actually handle.
Breaking into high finance with an Econ degree from DU is a bit of a far shot. I'm not sure how you'll even get into Big4 transaction advisory services, since they predominantly take CA's for those jobs (CA specifically covers a lot of technical aspects required in those jobs, not sure about Econ undergrad degree).
My two cents would be to to take, if you can get it, any of the above divisions you mentioned above. They're not "traditional" backgrounds for finance, but it'll still give you a brand name on your resume as well as something to talk about in interviews. You can always work there for a year and then leverage the contacts you make during that time to jump ship.
However, I'm not sure if it'll be easy to break into even Big4 with your background, so I'd say the Cap IQ job is a great starting gig. You'll be working with models, following companies closely and possibly doing some industry research, which is in fact much closer to what you would do as an IB analyst.
Parting word to the wise - if you consider the Cap IQ job boring, you'll be sorely disappointed by an IB analyst gig.
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