MBA in Need of Counsel
Hi all,
I find myself seeking the advice of strangers as I consider options for the future. I am a first-year MBA student at a top-15 program that I was admitted to on a full athletic scholarship after playing 5 years of D1 sports at the same university (3.7 GPA, Religion major in undergrad). After an injury derided a future in professional sports I was planning on going to law school, until I found myself presented with a full-ride MBA scholarship. I have considered options for 2020 summer internships and post-graduation full-time plans (December,2020 graduation), including a very promising lead to interview for the Associate internship program at a BB IB, as well as a lead to intern at a top tech VC. However, I am married with a baby and I enjoy time with them as well as time in the outdoors, etc., and I am not sure if I am cut out to perform the IB Associate lifestyle if it is really as bad as I have read on here. The VC lead would be great, but it is less promising.
I am in a bit of unique situation as the youngest person in my MBA cohort with a humanities undergrad degree and no work experience (except for 2 years coaching sports). I know it is difficult to give advice with such limited information, but is coming time to pick a major concentration and I appreciate any and all comments. Thanks.
Interesting situation. While you're obviously fortunate to be getting a free MBA at a young age, the biggest risk I see is that the MBA is very much an input/output game where its hard to get a lot out of it when you come in with so little experience.
Most important thing is that you use your MBA time, internship and first FT job to lock down a skill set. Sorry if that was already too obvious to say, but its important and easily overlooked since so many MBAs already had experience beforehand, unlike you.
So using VC as an example. Like any other careeer, there's a ladder to climb if you want to remain in it long term. Look at VC partners today, what background do they have. Mostly its entrepreneurship experience on the one hand, or alternatively they took the path of a fairly intense job first (IB or MC) followed by acquiring specialized experience that is highly relevant for VC . . like either working in big tech or going to a VC fund at a young age where they used their somewhat-developed diligence skills (they they acquired in IB or MC) to then become really sharp at VC diligence as they rose through the ranks.
So one way or another, they acquired some highly discernible skills (finance or entreprenurship) to get started, and then built from there.
If you're going into VC straight from MBA with no pre-MBA experience, the risk is that your usefulness to the firm isn't very high to start out, and then you don't have much to fall back on if for some reason you don't develop quickly there and then something happens that forces you to look for another job with limited skills.
Of course, the alternative could happen where you have a really long runway at the VC shop and you develop good diligence/sourcing skills there. But my advice would be, don't bank on that. Put pressure on yourself to use the MBA time very wisely; other MBAs say that all the time, but the reality is that they use the MBA time to relax and feel almost no pressure to develop skills while there.
Learn the valuation skill set as fast as you can and then use your remaining time to learn everything you can about early stage co's. Do any part time work or programs in the VC space that you can, for example if your school has an incubator or new venture kind of program then be all over that shit.
My b-school for example had an angel/vc fund and a new venture class, so if you were at my school I'd be telling you to take the class (obvi) but also ask the professor advising the VC fund if you can help evaluate deals.
Goal is to get to the VC shop after school with more cred than they expected, then work on more advanced stuff on day 1 than they would've otherwise had you work on. That way, if you're looking for a job in a year you've got a deal sheet and clear experience to point to.
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I think I will prepare for both IB (Citi) and VC (a16z) in hopes of getting VC. If VC doesn't work and I am able to get the associate position at Citi and grind it out for 3 or so years, and assuming I did not want to move up in banking, how would you assess my exit ops? Obviously its contingent upon a number of unknown factors, but from what I have heard they are not as good as for analysts.
Thanks again
Its a lot easier for analysts but an IB associate can also have good exit opps if they invest the time into developing those opps. The problem is there is very limited time when actually doing IB, so need to get started in b-school. If you know you want to go from associate to VC for example, get all the VC exposure you can ahead of time. Try and get an internship during 2nd year with a local VC firm, read up on deals, start sourcing companies, do whatever you can to make sure Tech is your group in IB.
I think it will be difficult to get into VC without either domain expertise in a science/tech, or without ibanking experience.
I'm also not sure even if you were to crack such an offer if it would be wise to accept it. Ibanking gives a concrete skillset. One can argue about how much or little value it provides, but it's a training program and a stamp on your CV that has real value. I suggest you seriously consider it. As for family - you're doing all of this for family, so you need to sacrifice to provide for them.
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