Starting in Venture Capital. Where/Why/If

Hi, Everyone. First of all, I’m just discovering this community and I wish I had known about it earlier. Thank you guys for contributing here to reveal the real world to students. For a quick profile overview, I’m a rising senior in college interning at a VC Fund in Columbus, I spent the last summer in Silicon Valley interviewing a range of investors and founders for a thesis, I owned an honestly quite bad ecommerce company for a year, but it allowed me to travel to China where I independently consulted for Alibaba in Hangzhou and drove $1000s of dollars into the Appalachian community. I’m from a non-target school but am in a program that offers extreme flexibility which allows for numerous unique experiences and is pretty competitive, meaning many of those in our (very small) classes find good placement out of school (official mentor went to McKinsey, unofficial BAML NY). Regardless, I have a strong interest in entrepreneurship, and think that a great way to get tons of exposure to ideas, types of founders, emerging industries etc. would be in Venture Capital. I know this is an industry that rarely hires directly out of school, but I was wondering where & how you would all go about pursuing a junior associate position from a non-target school I am aware that this would take a lot of networking, but that’s why I’m asking this now so that I can get a head start I have a strong (for my background) amount of investor and founder connections from doing thesis interviews last summer, but I feel it could be potentially be better to explore an established market outside of the valley (NY/LA/Boston), because I liked it but found it to be an expensive circlejerk and would enjoy more variety in people. Additionally, I’m curious as to any insight there might be on my thought process above regarding wanting to jump right into VC. I understand I would primarily be sourcing deals, but I would love to start a company one day and I think the exposure would be invaluable. I also would love to attend a top MBA program and I know that VC is often held in high regards for this. THANK YOU

Finally, I have a senior thesis to do and I think it would be great if I could study something to leverage goals above (it changed since last summer). Is this something I should focus (i.e. does this really matter compared to networking) or does it not matter as long as I do something I’m genuinely interested in and is generally within the realm of entrepreneurship