Low GPA, Non-target to solid PE SA offer, my story

Hey all, I just recently finished summer recruiting a couple of weeks back and will be joining a large PE shop (+$30B) as a summer analyst and decided to see if I can help other students break into finance since I personally found it pretty difficult coming from a non-target with a low gpa. As for my background, as you already know, I attend a non-target and my cGPA is about 3.2. Tbh, I am still quite shocked as to how I got the offer since I kind of just applied for lolz since I always figured it was outside my reach but somehow slipped through so I will give a brief overview of my journey and hopefully kids looking to break into the industry can pick up something useful.

Prior to getting the PE offer, I interned at a +$1B AM shop where I focused on covering US equities as a generalist. Landing a solid offer coming from a non-target, especially with a low gpa, takes a lot of leg work in the form of networking, stock pitches, etc. I think the biggest factor that helped offset my gpa, and school, was definitely my internship at the AM shop. At my AM internship, I was given a lot of responsibility and was lucky enough to work on research reports, sit in on sell-side calls, etc. The recruiting process to land the AM offer took quite a while as I spent multiple months networking with various buy-side analysts trying to see if I could somehow get any leads on any internship opportunities since I knew I would get screwed during formal recruiting. During this time I was also working on some stock pitches to send to these analysts to show I have a basic understanding of equity research (I recommend checking out a post on WSO titled "On The Job With Simple As… My Research Process", its really helpful and a great read). After following up with my contacts for a couple of months I was notified that one of the firms was looking at some target schools for an intern. Knowing this, I decided to reach out to the analyst in charge of recruiting and submitted a brief research report outlining my thoughts on a stock that I thought would fit nicely within the firm's portfolio given their strategy. To my luck, I was offered an interview and later secured the offer after trying to convince the analyst I was right for the role. If you manage to secure an internship offer try to get involved in as much stuff as possible to show your eagerness to learn about the industry from a professional standpoint.

In terms out of how to find firms I usually searched up [City - Insert Industry - i.e. hedge fund, MM pe firm, etc.]. For hedge funds and AM firms if I wasn't able to find much information on Google I would usually search for the fund’s SEC documents to see if I could find a contact/email format. From there I would then go on linkedin and search up the fund to see if there were any possible analysts I could reach out to (the subject I usually used was "[insert school name] Student Seeking Advice - [firm name/investment management]. Once I got a response, I would then start to focus a little bit more on how to actually impress them by researching their strategy inside out and pitching them a stock that I think they would like/fits their criteria. To expand a bit in terms of how to find possible stocks I would usually try to use a screener (filtering out for the usuals, P/E, ROIC, P/CF, etc.) or if I understood the strategy a bit more, I would look for other similar funds and compare the holdings (using 13fs) and would see if there were names that weren't overlapping. In terms of structuring the report, the above post titled "On The Job With Simple As… My Research Process" is great, I would also suggest getting used to reading through SEC reports to get a feel for how they're structured. Once somebody responds it is key not to fuck it up by sounding socially inept since, at the of the day, its just a conversation between 2 people so keep it interesting by asking some engaging questions (I like to ask questions going more in-depth on the firms strategy, the person's background, etc.) and try to slide in some personal information about yourself (i.e. you play basketball, hockey, soccer, football, etc. outside of school or ur a fan of some sport). The analyst is probably gonna want you to talk about who you are so this is the point to briefly list off who you are (school, major, interest in finance, outside interests, etc.) and keep it short. At the end of the day just try to sound chill but engaged.

In term of my gpa, one thing that I did having pushing me forward was that I managed to pick my grades up. At the end of my first yr I was sitting on a 2.7 so I decided to try to take some easier courses to see if i was able to bump it up and luckily enough I was able to raise it up little by little. If ur gpa is low i suggest trying to find courses that either genuinely interest you or take something u think wouldn't involve too much work/would be easy enough to pull a decent grade. Try to get one of your academic years on the honor list so that on your resume, instead of listing ur gpa, u can simply list something like "Dean's Honor List". This way when firms look at your resume they will at least know you have demonstrated some form of success in an academic setting.

Looking back, a large part of me receiving interviews and offers was attributed to luck as many of the things are outside your control, the best thing you can do is be persistent. If you send out 50 emails and get no responses, maybe the 51st will work out, you never know, things take time. I'll also briefly touch on interviews, I think prepping for technicals is a MUST. Understand your accounting, valuation, etc. and really be able to soundly communicate it (don't BS technicals since it's either right or wrong). For behavioural questions, I would suggest you shouldn't prep too much with this as you dont want to sound too rehearsed like a robot. Also, u dont want to sound like ur answers for "why PE/HF/AM" is BS. I would suggest u just say u naturally gravitated towards finance due to general curiosity and fell in love with it after networking and establishing mentors in the industry, etc. Lastly, dont be afraid to email people who didnt attend the same school as u did and when it comes to networking, you HAVE to keep up the relationship (send updates every now and then). I think if u follow some of this, things will eventually work out.

P.S. As a final point, I only managed to secure 4 interviews in the past 2 years but secured 2 offers out of them so dont worry if ur finding it tough af to land interviews let alone an offer. If things dont work out and u feel discouraged, take a break, chill with friends, binge something on netflix, whatever it is to calm u down. Once u feel like ur back in the mood/mindset, get back into it and try to keep ur enthusiasm up. y'all can do it.