Best internship path to PE: Prestigious and Fast Growing Company Corp Dev M&A Intern or Prestigious Bank Treasury Intern

Hello Wall Street Oasis.

I have been relentlessly researching through my network, LinkedIn, Reddit and WSO for the past weeks, without actually arriving at a definite answer to my dilemma.

I'm 21 and currently in the middle of my graduation at a top target school in Brazil and doing a target degree. I have a 3.16 GPA (which is probably going to keep increasing). My experience comprises Financial Planning for a law/fintech startup, university Finance Club in which I co-created the Private Equity division (a little over than a year at the club and some months in the PE division), development of an international academic network in the BRICS and a few other side projects. I have studied abroad in a top university in the country that went to for a semester and intend to do it again until the end of my graduation or during my masters or MBA. Not sure if it'll be helpful in any way in the future, but I also did the Yale summer program in my last year in high school, which is certainly a show off here in my country.

My main objective is to work for a Private Equity fund until the end of my graduation. I want PE because I love the fact that I get more proximity to the invested companies and have the opportunity to see my work actually making companies perform better. I don't really fancy going to a highly prestigious PE fund because of work/life balance and I would need to move to another city. I also don't want to go to IB for the same reasons.

However, I would like to have a few doors open if it was the case that I changed my mind and wanted to move to Equity Research / Asset Management. I very much like PE, but I'm open to different career paths as of this moment.

With all of that in mind, here's the decision I'm facing right now:

• M&A internship at a prestigious and fast growing company in the Education Sector.
  • largest in the country in its segment and one of the largest in the world;
  • more than 40 deals currently in the pipeline;
  • work to be done as an intern seems interesting. According to them, I get to participate in the entire flow, however will initially be most focused on valuation and modelling.
  • Everyone in my network that works in PE (and even one IB guy) told me to go for it because altough it wasn't directly in the financial markets, it is a well respected company and my work there would give me lots of applicable experience for PE in the future.
• Corporate Treasury internship at a large chinese / brazilian bank focused on corporate credit, which has branches in wealth and asset management, but no PE division.
  • Bank has a prestigious past, with important figures in asset management having emerged from it;
  • work to be done seems really mundane and boring, I will be just another gear making things move forward. However, I've heard from some people in the market that treasury is a place where you can learn a lot about the mechanics of the capital markets and that it would be a place where I could network within finance;
  • altough it's a corporate treasury job, i'll in fact be transitioning between corporate and proprietary treasury throughout my internship there, as the interviewer has told me;
  • maybe the prestige that'll be added to my resume will better help me land a job in PE than the skills I learn in Corp Dev, even though the work has nothing to do with PE?
  • people who work in Equity Research or Asset Management told me it was a better option because it'd provide me more options in the future if I wanted to move my career to that.

Well, I think this pretty much sums it all up.

I'd also like to add that pay in option #1 is reasonably lower than option #2, but I don't really mind that at this point in life since I have financial support from my parents. What I really want is to maximize my learning and my chances of getting into what I currently want (PE) in the timeframe that I have (3 years until graduation).

To conclude this lengthy wall-text success anxiety fear of failure prestige trap induced post, I have not landed any opportunities for internship at PE funds because they are not recruiting right now. So, maybe, there's option #3 which is waiting another semester for these opportunities while I stay at the finance club and my other side projects doing interesting stuff. However, I think it's really time to have my first real life professional experience.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT:

I said that I plan to study abroad in the future for a masters. I'd like to add that I specifically would like to explore options in China, since I think it offers great educational and networking opportunities while costing much lower than other countries with top global unis. So, maybe the bank option would help me with that?