M&A in Shanghai, Boutique IB in NYC, or BB DCM?

Hi all,

I am a Junior at a target and with summer recruiting wrapping up, I have a few possible options.

1. Working at boutique bank in Shanghai focusing on Cross Border M&A deals and investments
2. Working at a boutique bank in NYC that has traditionally focused on telecom
3. Working in DCM at a BB in NYC

Given that I plan on doing FT recruiting for BB IBD (probably not at the BB that I would be working in DCM at), which opportunity would set me up the best for that? I'm leaning towards working at the BB DCM given the name/brand and the chance to be in NYC to network, but would it be really hard to switch from DCM to industry groups down the road? Thanks in advance.

 
homiehomeskillet:

I think that I will learn quite a bit at the boutique, but they strongly emphasize that they want their interns to stay for the long run. I am aiming to be at a BB for full time, so I have concerns about leaving without pissing anyone off.

That is not a good reason to not accept the most relevant internship opportunity. It would be unwise if you didn't network with BBs and other firms, especially since it is in NYC. They have not given you a guaranteed fulltime offer, so you should take that one and keep your options open.
 

Take the bb in NYC. Anyone telling you otherwise is stupid. Name brand matters a lot, especially with ft recruiting. Being an investment banking analyst at a bb over the summer in NYC beats the m&a boutique internship.

Fact of the matter is when you get that bb ibd internship, you are considered qualified for virtually all bb ibd positions. This means you were screened and beat the filtering process. If you go boutique route, many might think you weren't good enough. Take the bb, network and lateral over for ft recruiting. I'm sure people will understand and will not hang you for working in dcm when that's not what you really want to do.

 
Best Response

this is bad advice and im going to tell you why

you are at a significant disadvantage recruiting for FT, instead of SA this isn't because of numbers, or because of any reason other than the fact that for FT recruiting, LESS TIME IS TAKEN TO TRAIN YOU think of it this way: you want to hire someone to rake leaves- are you going to take the harvard student, or the penn state grad with leaf raking experience the kind of work you get in M&A isn't hard, but you are required to know something if you already know the skill set that they want, they will save so much more time not having to train you DCM is IBD, but its a slightly different skill set

as long as you study your merger models well, you should be fine after all, you already go to a target, so you'll at least be able to land interviews

.
 

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