College straight to PE/IB

This has been talked about a lot on this forum.

I personally interned at an EB and also had a lesser-known MM PE offer from a firm I had interned at the summer before. Could I have taken that PE offer? Sure. Here's why, although I was happy I had the offer, I decided against it:

• Optionality. This PE firm covered a niche space, and I was slated to go into a generalist role at my EB. As many on this forum have said before, as a recent grad, "you don't even know what you don't even know." Meaning, there's many strategies, sectors, jobs, etc that you don't even know about or know if you like that you will probably be able to recruit into with ease after your IB analyst stint.
• Compensation. This more so applies to the non MF or UMM PE offers. But in general, you're gonna get paid more in IB and come out doing pretty similar hours as an analyst in PE.
• Training/Branding. This matters as an early career professional than you think. Again, if you can be an analyst at a top PE firm with a long running training program, go for it. But you likely will be debating offers from a more random MM or LMM shop because there are more of them. The branding of a top BB or EB shows you worked a legit role at a known and prestigious employer. Your future employers have a good sense of what they're going to get from your skillset. When you consider how poorly organized and institutionally low a priority analyst training programs are for most PE firms, you'll realize there's a reason most people come out of IB programs that train hundreds a year.

Again, there's some nuance needed. If your IB offer is a random boutique and you got a legit PE offer, then it can make sense. But having been at an EB for ~8 months now, even though I get crushed with work most of the time, I don't regret it at all. Especially not having gotten a buyside offer that I wouldn't get out of undergrad.