PE vs LO AM

I'd recommend going the PE route. Asset management is a long-term career, and if you don't like it, skillset is not terribly transferable. If you don't stick around long-term, you won't make a lot of money early on, and the only real switch you can make to get paid more is to a hedge fund - transition isn't necessarily easy given different mentality and lifestyle differences. Asset management is like an AUM aggregation game - you can't really live off of a fund unless you can raise a considerable amount of capital. Private equity can scale both larger and smaller, so you can buy and run a small business if push comes to shove, but also skew up and down across LMM / MM / MF as well as sector / style (e.g. tech growth) if you really want. If you don't know what you really want to do and want to leave open optionality, would take MM PE. If you know for a fact that you are okay making less than your peers for the first half decade and your absolute priority is lifestyle, then asset management is definitely the choice. From a learning perspective and markets side of things, asset management is probably more fun imo, but that also depends on your firm's diligence process.