Does "good culture" exist at the pre-MBA level in PE?
I'm headed to MBB as a BA/AC/A in a few months, and I've been considering pre-MBA associate recruiting in the next cycle (won't be ready or experienced this cycle). I want to do PE for 2 years and for the typical reasons (experience, comp, b-school), but I plan to go to b-school and not look back after my 2-year stint (maybe go back to MBB, maybe do something else, but not post-MBA PE).
My question is, is the culture in PE broadly as bad as WSO makes it out to be?
Everyone I've talked to at my MBB (both senior level and people who I was friends with in school) makes working at MBB seem like an incredibly fun experience - taking weekend trips with your class, including work colleagues in your wedding party, things like that. My incoming class is also reasonably demographically similar to the school I just graduated from (in terms of gender, race, socioeconomic background, etc.), which is important to me.
PE seems to be just the opposite. Everything I've heard about culture seems to be about how stressful or sweaty any given shop is, and there's very little talk of the general camaraderie/commiseration that seems pretty prominent across IB/MBB. Also, PE investing teams are overwhelmingly white dudes, which is a homogeneity that I'd consider a pretty big negative, especially as the MBB/IB analyst classes that they recruit from have become more diverse. I understand that PE requires long hours, but there seems to be very little in the way of people/culture that makes the long hours worth it in the way MBB/IB seems to have.
I've seen the posts about lifestyle and all the complaints about sweatier shops, but what I really mean by "culture" is more about the level of personal/professional development, the mentorship/network that firms offer, the working environment (in terms of how people treat each other), and the general level of respect/friendship among colleagues. I understand that PE firms probably aren't going to match MBB on these dimensions, but does culture really go out the window if you make the jump from MBB to PE? The upsides of PE are enticing, but I'm not sure if I'm ready to be chewed up and spit out by a PE associate program.
I realize I may have rose-colored glasses about culture, and I could accept that MBB culture is overhyped/PE culture is overblown. However, my experiences with people in real life and the tone of the posts about PE on WSO have me worried.
So did you ignore all the Asians/Indians purposefully or do they not constitute real diversity in your book?
FWIW, I'm an Asian guy, but I didn't include them because I think my statement about PE associate classes being majority white guys is true, and because it seems that Asian/Indian guys are, like white guys, overrepresented in PE classes relative to the demographics of the IB/MBB classes that PE firms recruit from.
Shouldn't you be comparing representation vs people who interview and not the entire class? And got it, so being overrepresented means the class is no longer "diverse" despite a large chunk being non white because it's not the right kind of non-white
I'm not interested in arguing over the merits of diversity - all I'm saying is that MBB seems to more deliberately hire and support people from different backgrounds (across gender, race, socioeconomic background, sexual orientation, and other demographics) than most PE firms.
I realize that I'm on the outside looking in, but the fact that PE associate classes are significantly more homogenous than my college or my MBB analyst class is one of several factors that make me concerned that PE might not be a good cultural fit for me. I'm hoping those with experience in PE can shed some light on this perspective.
I don’t work in PE, but I’m pretty sure If you define good culture as deliberate hiring of people from different genders, sexual orientations, and ethnicities, instead of hiring the best talent that also fits the culture of that pe firm, then PE probably doesn’t have “good culture”.