I Don't Wanna Go To PE Anymore
Current 2nd year in IB with a MM PE offer I signed during on-cycle.
I hate IB and I don't care about anything I do or learn about anymore. Also don't think I even want PE anymore, would rather take out a loan and buy a small business and work for myself. I don't know if I have the guts to quit though given how hard I worked to get the PE seat and feel like I need to see it out, do PE for at least a year. Just don't know if i can do the year in IB in between.
Any advice for someone in my position? Like I'm wondering if I should just be a horrible IB analyst how bad would that be.
Take your foot off the gas and be lower middle bucket. Very rare banks actually fire an analyst. Push back against as much work as you can and don’t focus on being liked.
Also use all your PTO and take as many vacations as you can.
Also I don’t necessarily think it’s bad to try out PE for a year or two if you don’t want to do it, but if there’s something you’d rather do than PE, just do it lol.
This. Plus unless you already have a fat stack, buying a small business got substantially harder to finance this year. Still can definitely be done, but your opportunities are much smaller.
Took this approach and got fired
Then don't? Do something else? Nobody here is going to tell you to stay in an industry you hate/don't want to be in out of some theoretical obligation to "the path". That's just sunk cost fallacy. If you don't want PE then there's no reason to care about getting blackballed for renegging on the offer you accepted (which might not even happen if your given reason is leaving PE entirely vs accepting an offer elsewhere, potentially leaving some doors open if you change your mind later). You haven't given any background as to why you hate banking and by extension the idea of working in PE. Without knowing the reasons there's no point in giving advice on those topics/trying to convince you otherwise (particularly since I didn't do banking/have always thought it was lousy hence choosing not to do it + PE left a bad taste in my mouth). At the end of the day, it's just a job my guy.
I'll say this much, the whole "I'll just buy a business and be my own boss" thing isn't a panacea and is a gross oversimplification that's always bothered me with how casually people suggest it. I've said this on another thread where a guy who was a poor analyst (bad at xls & ppt, bad reviews, etc.; not saying your similar performance-wise just pulling on thread of "oh I can't/won't do X so I'll do Y instead) was wondering if he could still do PE, then after being told no asked how hard starting a rollup/doing entrepreneurship is - Entrepreneurship is infinitely more difficult than anything people do in "high finance". If you can't easily grasp concepts that can be self-taught from scratch inside a few months, you will fail miserably trying to start anything simply because you lack the gumption. It's not about complexity, it's about persistence and willingness to self-improve. It will be more stressful, for a long period you will make considerably less, and the likelihood of failure is orders of magnitude higher. Adding leverage to that mix introduces the fun additional risk of straight up bankruptcy, and if it's an SBA loan that comes with potentially losing some if not all of any hard assets you currently own because of the personal guarantee. I do not intend to discourage, just provide fair warning so you can make an informed decision because I have seen first-hand what happens to people who fail at it and it is NOT pretty.
PE is IB 2.0, if you hate IB then you’ll likely hate PE. Might be worth shooting out networking emails and coffee chatting people across a few spaces your interested in instead to figure out what alternatives you jive most with
You can easily do the bare minimum for 6 months without being fired. Once people start sniffing around and it’s looking bad you hit HR with an FMLA email citing mental health and buy yourself a few more months totally off.
why you even joined IB?
because most college kids don't think for themselves they're just looking at what people say to do online and at what their peers are doing to make early career decisions
If you’re less than 24 months out of school and “I hate IB and I don't care about anything I do or learn about anymore” is your attitude, I don’t know what fixes that.
This is either a personal issue or you’re just dramatically in the wrong pond and need to go back to the drawing board entirely, like get into an entirely different career/profession. Doing a 15 degree change of course (ie going to consulting or a start-up) won’t fix this.
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