How do these job offers compare?

That is an interesting question because I had an interview at a BB where they seemed to dislike all of my answers.

Many, but not all, would be looking at that from a perspective of more experienced candidate or someone who can't see themselves staying another day in banking.

For those of you who have done banking or who have a blue chip background it may be easy to feel the grass is greener or that this is not a good move.

I took my current job because I was a nontraditional candidate happy to get any offer I could, I'd like to develop my potential to be more in line with long term goals.

Because pay and work quality at most HFs is shit.

<span itemprop=name>OG Monkey</span>:

Can't comment on the MBA process or options 2-4, but if PE/CorpDev is the goal down the road, I can say option 1 can help build strong accounting foundation in a deal context.

Depending on your partner/group, you can get exposure to a variety of different transactions as diligence engagements tend to be shorter as they only make up one small section of the deal process. This is good in the sense that you could get exposure to nuances and details of various transactions that you wouldn't see if you in other roles, and can be useful to know in PE/CorpDev. Buy side diligence mandates are generally shorter, while sell side mandates can last a few months. One interesting point is if your big 4 office has a corporate finance (MM IB) group, the TS group might sometimes be engaged by the corporate finance group to help out on certain parts of a sell side mandate, though I imagine this is group/office dependent.

There may be opportunities to review purchase agreements, though this will often be done at the senior manager/partner level - but findings from the diligence process you'll be involved in will be used for recommendations/updates to these agreements. Being involved in these type of discussions can help you understand considerations that go into a transaction, and how to minimize risk exposures to the client.

I'll caveat by saying you won't get exposure to the whole deal process, and you'll generally focus on a smaller, specialized area of the transaction. However, you will gain skills that allow you to understand the underlying financials of a company, understand operations to the extent of how they impact financials, and throughout your time, you'll likely pick up small bits of pieces to learn at a high level how the overall deal process works.

I'm pushing to interview with the CF group but I've got limited contacts to hear more about the actual dealflow and work process. I may be wrong but isn't a lot of what you described from the FDD viewpoint? From what I've been told I'll be assigned to Valuations. What worries me is whether or not it will be seen as not transactional enough? How do accountants view TS? It's my understanding most auditors find it difficult to lateral to TS but I'm not sure if that is due to anything structural.