GS Market Risk or McKinsey
Goldman Sachs Risk Management for Market Risk or McKinsey Graduate Analyst? I dont care about exit opps, I can figure it out myself. Which one is more baller in your opinion? Doesnt mean i will take the baller-ER one? Just a question. Put A for GS and B for McKinsey.
Market Risk Analyst at Goldman Sachs or Consulting at Mckinsey & Co.
McKinsey & Co is the obvious choice for career minded person. You’ll be competitive for an entry into various high paying jobs in finance and the best business schools in the country. Both groups are great but the it depends on what you value.
Key Takeaways
- Goldman Sachs Risk management is great place to build a stable high paying career
- McKinsey will provide more career optionality than risk management.
from certified user @kanon"
McKinsey. You say you may not care about exit ops, fact of the matter is very few people stay with one firm for the rest of their lives. So considering exit ops is a rather prudent thing to do.
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Is this a serious question? Probably half the people with both offers would take McKinsey analyst over GS investment banking, much less risk management. McKinsey and its not even debatable, its like comparing Harvard to U-Idaho. McKinsey is great for private equity, golden for business school, and considered one of the most prestigious positions in the business world. If you got Mckinsey congrats
I like that you are wise enough not to care about what people say are exit ops. I'd go with McKinsey. Can't beat that!
I'm going to be the usual contrarian and suggest risk management. It's a pretty nice lifestyle and often a mathematical/fundamental challenge. You won't get FILTHY rich, but you will be well into the upper-middle-class/rich, have time for a family, and will not be expected to travel somewhere new every week. Given the current socioeconomic trends in the wake of the crash and with tax hikes coming anyways, it might not be a bad place to be. McKinsey is a great firm; so is Goldman Sachs. Both will have a lot of smart people that you can learn a lot from.
McKinsey. You say you may not care about exit ops, fact of the matter is very few people stay with one firm for the rest of their lives. So considering exit ops is a rather prudent thing to do.
With McKinsey, you get very broad experience. Even if you don't end up liking consulting as a whole, you'll get exposure to a lot of different industries and the job can be interesting in that aspect. You'll see a lot from this role. And worse comes to worse, if you really don't like it, McKinsey then offers a lot of other options (business school, PE, industry, possibly something finance...)
With market risk... not even talking GS here, but market risk in general - it's quite specific. What if you don't like that field? Then you're sunk - because it leads to a limited number of other types of jobs.
It's generally relatively easy to go from technical to qualitative (worst comes to worst, get an MBA- won't be too difficult to get into a top five school with a niche capital markets background), but the other way around is harder. Still, a risk manager has a pretty nice lifestyle, and it's a profession that's been a part of banking in some way shape or form for centuries. If you like being the guy that helps the firm survive the recession/crash, risk management is a good place to be and Goldman is an excellent place to find a lot of smart people to learn from.
You've got two great options; I'm just being my usual contrarian self to make sure you've considered both.
^Illini - I agree with what you're saying in terms of lifestyle and etc. But I think the idea of risk management is very very specific. And as a result, you'll build a very specific skillset. It may not necessarily be desirable for someone coming straight out of college who still has to work a few years before understanding what they like/dislike. I would know, I started out at a very unusual group at a bank and it's a tough to move away from it after realizing what I really want.
Going from qualitative to tech/quant is hard, yes. But that depends on what you want to do. If this guy chooses consulting and say... wants to become a prop trader, it'll be a tough thing to pull off. But if say later down the line he chooses something else like banking, pe, corp dev/industry, strategy, operations - something along those lines, then he's got a lot more to choose from. You can't go into the breadth of fields via risk mngt. He would have to go through a MBA to become a career changer.
But yes, either way you have nice options. Do think about what you may want long-term, and I think that will be the way to make a decision.
Think about it this way. GS IBD = McKinsey Consulting (some would argue Mckinsey is harder to get, more prestigious, and looks better for Business school). If it was GS IBD vs GS market risk which would you choose? the answer is obvious
Both groups are arguably best-in-industry. I would argue that GS risk management is one of the highest-paying reasonably stable jobs you can land anywhere and still have some hope of being a good parent/spouse one day. You can make a career of McKinsey- my friend's Mom worked there- but your kids will hate you.
McKinsey might look better overall, but ultimately, it's two different makets for the adcoms. The adcoms always try to target 10% from S&T but never yield more than a fraction of that. In other words, if you're coming from the markets side and want to do an MBA, it will be easy to get in.
One of my coworkers in analytics at a "respectable" BB was a programmer who owned a small system after six years in industry. He played up the fact that he was on the trading side big time and got admitted at Wharton, Harvard, and Chicago. Risk management at GS is two or three tiers above that, you will be competing against people like my coworker, and they will have plenty of unfilled spots for markets guys to put you in, anyways. Fair or not, people from random, unpopular sectors make much stronger candidates for school in the same way that the kid from Alabama with a 1340 SAT score gets into Harvard while the 1600 from Greenwich gets rejected. With Capital Markets, you're coming from the equivalent of Alabama; with GS, you've got the equivalent of a 1570 SAT. McKinsey might give you a 1600 SAT, but then you've got to compete against the other kids from Greenwich- especially including other kids at McKinsey who have similar backgrounds.
For better or for worse, I can guarantee you one thing- if you apply to B-school from risk management, you'll be pretty unique. :D
wait--is Mck "graduate analyst" a FO role--it sounds like a research position--entry level's at mck are called ba's (business analysts)
if i am right this is more of a toss up than most people have posted. if it is a BA position and you just called it graduate then yes I think McK is the way to go.
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