Difficult ASO Class in MF PE
Currently in an MF PE ASO Program, and I am surrounded by difficult personalities.
I don't know if anyone else has felt this way, but I genuinely HATE my ASO class - they're all just a bunch of privileged trust fund hardos who could not run a fast food joint if their lives depended on it. What's also weird is that some of them came from schools like Duke and Dartmouth, which do not have undergrad business programs, yet they're some of the biggest hardos I have ever dealt with. They mostly majored in the humanities, yet these NPCs in my bullpen got NOTHING human about them. It's so sad that I have to see and deal with these soulless rubber people every single day.
And the overall vibe at my firm? It’s like a morgue. Except everyone’s alive, but barely. You’ll feel like a zombie just trudging through the day in a haze of fear and micromanagement. Everyone walks on eggshells 24/7, terrified of making a wrong move, constantly being scrutinized by clowns , who are managers in title alone and title only, who couldn’t manage a circus, let alone a financial firm.
Trying to bolt to HF or VC or MM PE, but I am not getting much traction from the dead job market, which is so upsetting because I did EB IBD Top Group before this and graduated with honors from an Ivy before that.
The fact that my MF PE firm has nonexistent upward mobility, combined with the shortage of exit opps from the dead job market, makes my ASO program feel like a dead end job.
Has anyone else ever dealt with a similar situation?
Any and all advice, and kind words, are much appreciated, as after writing this comment, I have to go back to dealing with my snake pit of an ASO class.
Somewhat unrelated but you know that most top undergrad programs do not offer business/finance as a major, right? Only Wharton in the Ivy League and none of the other top schools in Chicago/MIT/Stanford/Northwestern/Duke/etc offer it. Generally, most people study economics
Yes yes, and I can see how city colleges like Columbia and UChicago can breed a preprofessional culture due to their locations and strong MBA programs, but we're talking about schools like Duke and Dartmouth here.
I have friends who attended undergrad business programs like Wharton, Cornell Dyson and Nolan, Georgetown McDonough, Michigan Ross, NYU Stern, etc., and even they are much more pleasant to deal with than these soulless NPCs who are in my ASO class.
A good chunk of them didn't even major in econ or math, and they are the most neurotic hardos I have ever come across and just miserable to work with.
These mindless rubber people majored in the humanities and got NOTHING human about them to show for their studies.
Do you know what the undergrad demographics are for Duke and Dartmouth? Those kids were born to be white collar...
I spent a few years as an executive at a portfolio company. While I was there, the PE fund (one that is mentioned on these forums frequently) assigned me one of their interns. The guy was actually awesome, so that's not the point of this post
What was incredibly eye-opening for me, as somebody who went to non-target school and didn't have family or friends in PE, is how many people in at "top funds" have truly been bred for this shit since they were in high school. I'm talking the whole nine yards - $50k+ per year prep school, top UG, knew to sign up for all these clubs, pursued banking / PE right away, etc.. you can see how these types of people are either huge hardos or just losers you don't want to hang out with
I completely backdoored my way into PE, but once I was in the industry, working with people across various funds, you'd be shocked at how many people fit the above path when you look at UMM or MF. No shame in it, I wish I had those connections or was educated about PE earlier than 7-10 years into my career, but just an interesting observation nonetheless
thats how i feel at one of the schools mentioned above coming from a public school vs. all these kids from exeter, andover, etc. etc.
One piece of advice I got for being in an environment where you don’t relate to people, is to be curious and non judgemental about them.
Ask them questions about themselves, their weekend, their family, their interests etc. When someone tells you they’re planning on doing something over the weekend, ask them about it on Monday. You don’t have to pretend to be a hardo to just be a friendly person and the friendlier you are, the more people will open up to you. Be confident in yourself and be yourself authentically, but be curious and open to learning about other people and you’ll make good relationships.
There’s a great book on this called “First Impressions” by Anne Demarais and Valerie White. Highly recommend it for everyone to read, really gives you good actionable and tactical insight into how people form relationships and impressions.
Thank you and I really appreciate your insight here, but I have done everything you wrote, and it just caused them to walk all over me, give one-word answers, never ask about me, and show soul crushing levels of passive aggressiveness.
I was nice at first, no matter how unfriendly they were to me and to each other, but it eventually led to burnout and now no one says good morning to each other at all.
Once again, I really appreciate your insight, so any follow up advice would be greatly appreciated.
That’s completely fair, there is only so much you can do as an individual.
What I will say though is that it’s unlikely that you’re the only one that feels that way. I bet you at least a few others are sort of feeling the same and it’s likely 1-2 people who are setting the tone. I would keep trying to be friendly, trying to be socially generous (ask more about them vs trying to talk about yourself), be open and willing to help, be willing to be a little bit vulnerable, give genuine compliments when you can. At first, just focus on getting to know one person not the entire class.
Outside of that, befriend the admins, the HR people, the back office guys, the janitors. They’re all your colleagues too and I bet you they are not massive hardos. One of my favorite people to talk to and hang out with was one of our Admins who I’d always go over to and chit chat about anything. I used to always talk to this one cleaning lady who used to come around in the evening and I think she really appreciated actually being acknowledged.
Even if people keep being awkward and intense, I bet that people willl notice that you are a positive person and you’ll slowly find more people (both your peers and frankly your seniors) wanting to be around you.
Look its a game that they have played from birth and will play until they die. U either get it or u dont. Its just how the WASPs roll.
if u didnt go to college with a high percentage of these prep kids this might just be the first time in ur life u are exposed to it.
these are the grandchildren and greatcgrandchildren of some of the most money hungry, vicious, soulless humans that ever set foot in north america. why would u expect their offspring etc to be any different?
I went through this experience on an IB team I worked for. It was soul-crushing and mentally draining every day. My advice is to just try to be as friendly as you can but in the mean time look for an exit as much as possible. This shit is not worth your mental health.
It really is not, and I am trying to bolt to the next available HF or VC or MM PE opportunity as soon as it comes, but the lateral and exit markets are cooked in this economy.
I also know that my MF PE firm has nonexistent upward mobility, so this thing feels like a complete dead end job.
I may very well be joining the great many who have followed the Ivy UG --> EB IB --> MF PE --> Tiger Cub / SM HF path, with aspirations to live out the American Dream, and failed miserably somewhere along the way, forever doomed to be forgotten as a cog in a giant absurd machine.
That's a little negative man... take a step back and you'll realize you are in the 0.1% of professional outcomes at your age. You're adopting the same hardo mindset you're criticizing if you think not making it to or flaming out of a Tiger Cub is failing miserably.. there are a gazillion ways to make money out there.
I am a few years older than you (title is stale) and it's amazing the variety of exits my class took after PE. Everything from entrepreneurship/buying a business, to startup, to MM PE or corporate... or staying in PE/HF and grinding it out. Most of them heavily changed paths from what they set out to do at 21 and it all worked out.
All to say, there are so many ways to be happy and fulfilled that aren't MF PE or a top HF, it's not a failure if you decide you want something different. You have a sterling resume, get to 1 year and then start thinking about what you want to do long term and what fits with your skillset and interests.
As someone who also didn't come from that background and dealt with folks like this in my career, my best piece of advice is to suck it up for at least 1 yr (and ideally 2). If you can get that stamp on your resume, other opps will open up... Yes the lateral market sucks right now, but you have a great background, something interesting will open up.
I am doing everything I can to believe what you wrote, as well as hold onto that hope, but more often than not, it does feel like I am barely hanging on by a thread.
On a side note, I know some people who graduated jobless in 2022-2025, who seemed like losers at the time, but then got amazing gigs completely out of this world even after 2-3 years of being unemployed, that anyone doing 2+2 would exit to in a heartbeat, so I am debating just finishing out my dead end job of an MF PE ASO program, taking some time off to destress, and then recruiting for HF after.
Sure, I may not hit the Tiger Cubs and Grandcubs, but a lot of other great SM HFs like distressed ones (Redwood, Knighthead, Nut Tree, etc.) and value LOs (Abdiel, Abrams, Abrams Bison, etc.) seem to have a lot of good analysts from nontraditional backgrounds, so I am debating whether I should just focus on finishing my ASO stint and then recruiting after, although that is quite risky.
Maybe I'm just too burnt out to think straight and am wrong about this, or maybe I am correct.
Would greatly appreciate any insight on this.
You might be the first person ever that has called a MF PE associate job dead end haha
Idk man managing a circus sounds pretty tough
lol MF PE professionals are generally hardos regardless of whether their elite university had a business program or not.
Not even surprised to hear you say that. Some of these shops are truly soul sucking
Everything you wrote, and the utter and total disregard for human life at some of these places is appalling...
calls its PE firm a lifeless place (morgue/zombies) but then proceeds to write a post with AI which feels as lifeless as the people he complains
100% used AI.. maybe even a bot based on some of these responses..
Cornell softie spotted
Damn can't I just read about some PE associate's existential crisis without some dude who's made multiple posts asking career questions about Amazon's fucking corp dev program throwing shots at my alma mater??
Get back to cranking those IRRs softie
Go Big Red!
You sound like an entitled smartass prick. I mean it in as constructive a way as possible - try dropping your airs of having gone to a better Ivy league school, a better IB program, worked harder without a trust fund and see if your coworkers become more interesting or nicer people
This is partly a people business, and you have to learn to deal with people even though you don’t implicitly like and you have to hide it well.
Speaking partly from experience, if nobody likes you, or worse thinks you are much smarter and cutthroat, doing a deal with you will make them look like an idiot eventually and nobody will work with you. You’ll be an associate forever.
Be the nice charismatic guy everyone loves, be smart quietly and nobody has to know how much smarter you are
im so smart papa and no-one knows it
Just try to be nice with them even if they are not nice with you. Be nice with everyone, and at some point people will notice that you are a nice guy and will be nice back. Try to gain the trust of the bullpen and avoid being judgmental with them. As said above, ask questions and be approachable
Oh believe me, I have tried that, and it just made them feel like they could walk all over me.
I could only put up a fake smile and attempt different ways to be nice only for so long before they thought of me as a people pleaser and use that as an excuse to treat me like a doormat.
You’ve said this a few times - what does walking all over you look like? Associates are rarely double staffed or work directly together, so it’s hard to imagine how they’re directly doing something to take advantage of you. I could see them being unpleasant or unfriendly, but that’s different from walking all over you.
If they’re just asking for a lot of help and not reciprocating - give us some examples of what those asks are and what your asks of them are.
try pretending u are one of them for the day and see how it goes
be like patrick "sigma male" bateman
PE is enough generations into its life where so many funds are full of nepo kids whose dads work(ed) in IB/PE/corporate execs. There's funds I've seen with ~25-30 people and a large portion of people under 35 are pure nepo kids where dad is/was CEO of massive companies, MP/partner at large PE funds, or head of IB at a major bank, etc. Ironically enough most of them tend to be polished from a speaking perspective (growing up the way they did they had every resource to be so) but are so average from an ability standpoint. As an LP give me the dude who went to a rando school, grinded their balls off over people who had it all rigged in their favor.
I think this is why there will always be startup funds that exceed incumbents in the PE industry - the talent will spin off to do their own thing if they realize they're at funds that aren't compensating them for their contributions (i.e. they are better than everyone, but handcuffed by politics).
bingo hence why funds 1-3 and smaller funds tend to blow the larger funds out of the water returns wise. highly motivated people = better returns
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