What do I say during VP informationals if I was a bottom bucket associate

Title says all, I was bottom bucket because of poor modeling/accounting skills but was good at most other things. I'm at my MBA now at H and we have good resources for making up for past deficiencies here and I have been working outside of class with profs to touch up all my weak areas. 

I have some VP informationals coming up so want to know what to do when asked if I had a return offer. The truthful answer is no but typically I say that I did not want to go back to {city} so the firm and I parted ways on good terms (which is true - they were happy with me even if I was meh).

However some of the firms I'm talking with are peer firms to my old one and I figure they'll probably do backchannel checks. I'm wondering if I should call my old principal and explain to him that while I was kind of mid at the time, I've been working hard and want a second go round in PE (aka: my brother: don't fuck me please). 

What do you guys think? I'm hardworking, likeable, and smart, but feel I had my personal black swan event for a number of reasons, so holding that as given, wondering how I position successfully.

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If you had a decent relationship with your Principal(s)/VPs, they shouldn’t screw you anyways unless you were really really bad (sounds like not the case) or there were interpersonal challenges (also sounds like not the case). That said, I don’t see much harm in just informally catching up with them and mentioning that you’re recruiting in the conversation. Could be proactive about communicating what you’ve learned at school, ask about any advice, things they wish they knew when making the transition to VP, etc., and depending on how you position it, they should get the message/come away not wanting to screw up your plans. From what I’ve seen, people tend to be very candid with negative feedback about people they know if that person is looking to join their firm (i.e. a colleague asking a coworker if they know person X and if they have thoughts) because it could reflect poorly on them if that person gets hired and underperforms. Unless there’s a personal issue, people anecdotally tend to be much less candid with negative feedback about someone looking to join another firm/during third-party reference checks. Good luck!

 

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