Extreme Non-Target to NYC HF

This is going to be my first and last post as I made the jump to a HF a few weeks back and am not likely to browse through topics here as often as I used to. I just wanted to jot down a few thoughts in the hopes that it will help someone who is in a similar situation that I was, or at the very least give some inspiration.

I’ll start off with some background for context. I am the only child of a used car salesman and his wife that also happens to be his secretary. Most of my childhood was spent in a rural farm town in the Midwest which was far away from the nearest airport or big city. Given that neither of my parents have ever stepped foot on a college campus, academics was the least of my worries throughout elementary school and an unimpressive public high school. So, to no surprise I ended up at a random state school that had absolutely zero ties to wall street with no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I picked finance as a major because the subject matter always sounded interesting despite not having any knowledge of the field. Since I was paying my own way through school, I took a few on-campus jobs to help stay afloat. It was halfway though my junior year that I stumbled across this site and spent weeks going down the WSO rabbit hole reading every thread I had time to. During that time span I learned the difference between BBs/EBs/MMs, what a target school was, and how insanely competitive this industry is. I was hooked. I became obsessed with the notion of working in IB despite my situation. Since my school had a non-existent alumni network and no OCR worth mentioning here, I resorted to filling out online applications to any position for any firm I could. By the grace of God, my 3.4 GPA somehow made it through the HR screen for a summer Risk internship at a MM which I ended up getting. I was still naively convinced that somehow, I could make it to IB. Even during the internship, I pounded IB technicals like crazy. One night, the entire department decided to go out for drinks and only a few of us stuck around late. I got to talking with my firm’s Chief Risk Officer, and we bonded over playing the same high school sports.  Over the remaining weeks of my internship, I would go to his office just to talk about random stuff. One day, he asked what I wanted to do and I explained my newfound obsession with IB. He told me that time had passed for formal recruiting and he doubted if there was anything left. But he said he had a close friend in IB that was an MD, and he would make a phone call for me. Two days later, I got a call at my desk from that MD who said that one of the analysts that had signed on chose to go to a different firm. We talked for a bit and he told me he would be willing to interview me to be one of his M&A analysts in NYC. I flew out 4 days later, and did well enough to receive an offer. Til the day I die, I will remember how happy I was when they called to send me an offer letter.  Fast forward two years later and I ended up getting an off-cycle interview at a HF here in NYC through some networking and made the jump mid-August.

As far as making opportunities for yourself is concerned, if you have a similar background to mine you will have to be an absolute animal when it comes to networking. When I had a few seconds to breathe on the desk, I would go on my personal laptop and find every finance event or charity event I could in the city and ask to be a volunteer so I could attend. Once I was there, I would talk to literally everyone in the room. After a few times, I was able to convince a few individuals to ask around for any openings. I went through interviews at 3 different L/S funds before getting an offer at my current fund. It is going to come down to finding a team that likes you enough to take a chance.

Now let’s talk technical questions. If you are from a non-target, you are expected to be perfect. I would advise going through technical questions every night before you go to bed for at least 15-20 min. Also, go through the interview pages here and brainstorm answers to the ‘fit’ questions. You need to be able to spin your situation into an underdog story of sorts while still proving your knowledge. You are not going to get on a HF team without them thinking you can add a lot of value.

I also want to touch on impostor syndrome. You will have to accept the fact that other analysts from target schools are going to get more opportunities than you. You are also going to have to accept the fact that on-cycle recruiting and headhunters are going to be useless to you. If you were truly not capable of the work, you would not have been given an offer in the first place. There is no use in wishing you would have tried harder earlier in life to get to a better school or wishing you had parents with knowledge/connections to get you to a better place now. There are going to be buy side and sell side firms that really care about prestige, and there are going to ones that care more about grit, creativity, and cultural fit. It is on you to find the latter, even though this forum would lead you to believe prestige, GPA, and diversity are all that matters to every firm. I promise they do exist and are more common than you would think. Sure, I may not be at Pershing Square or a Tiger Cub coming from Goldman. But if I can’t be happy with low to mid six figures in my mid-twenties, then I have bigger mental problems that I should address.

I don’t want to give away too much more since I don’t want to be found on LinkedIn. If anyone has pressing questions, feel free to PM me and I will try to be as helpful as I can. Thank you to all on here who post interview questions, tips, and guides. They have been incredibly helpful to me over the past few years. If you are in a similar situation to me, do not be afraid to do unconventional things in order to break in. At the end of the day, it’s all about what you make with the hand you are dealt. If luck is just a matter of picking names out of a hat, then put your name in more f*cking hats. Best of luck!