No full time offers, seeking life advice?
Hi everyone,
I worked really hard recently to land a full time offer in PE or consulting, but I have been completely unsuccessful and am worried about what to do next. I'm hoping anyone can give me suggestions on types of jobs to look for if my long term goal is to work at a respectable MM or MF.
Background: senior at a target (H/W/Y/P), previous summer internship at GS/JPM/MS in investment banking + no offer, 3.5 GPA. Whenever asked if I got a return I say I didn't get one because I was looking not to work in NY. Looking to work in any major US city.
Are there any relevant jobs left? Should I delay graduation?
Why didn't you get one? Maybe some reflection will help.
Sorry to hear things aren't working out right now. Some unorganized thoughts:
Don't delay graduation.
"Whenever asked if I got a return I say I didn't get one because I was looking not to work in NY."
I would stop saying this - it comes off as insincere and makes me wonder why you're hiding the ball, which in turn makes me wonder if you've actually learned anything from this ordeal. Try to pick something where you can craft a story and demonstrate that you're learning or actively addressing a weakness, or maybe talk about a mismatch in the role vs your expectations.
If your end goal is MM+ PE, then you really need to be ready for a longer, indirect route. Assuming all the top IB/consulting jobs are already gone, then you're going to need to get the next best thing (F500 FP&A or strategy, boutique consulting/IB, etc.) then from there to banking and ultimately to PE.
What do you think about trying to get into a boutique PE shop or VC? Maybe, I could scale up to better PE shops after working 1-2 years at a smaller PE shop / VC? What about entering real estate PE?
Also, I've been thinking about refining my response about the return offer. What do you think of this: "where I come from, you stick together with family and [insert parent] is sick, so I ultimately decided not to accept a return in NY because it meant being away from my family. Long term I hope to work near my family."
One of my parents actually is sick (I won't say which to prevent disclosing personal info), and it did factor into my decision making. So I just wonder if you think this would suffice.
After reflecting on my time at the summer analyst role, I honestly think I did not get a return due to bs matters. I think if you asked all the other interns, I was incredibly knowledgeable and willing to help other interns when certain tasks came up. But I unfortunately was staffed with an analyst banker who had been in banking for 4+ and demanded complex tasks I never learned, so he probably deemed me incompetent. Another analyst I was staffed with was a highly irritable woman. One night I left the office early due to miscommunication and she got heated because of it. I think these two write ups got me the boot. Some of my fellow interns were incredibly incompetent but were assigned to analysts who gave them easy tasks.
LOL this feels so real. similar to my summer experience...
Not only is your revised answer still a horrible response and transparently insincere, but your reflection makes you come off as arrogant and devoid of any ability to admit humility or fault. Not once in your explanation did you mention yourself. Instead you blamed your location, family situation (I am sorry to hear about your parent), fellow interns, superiors, and colleagues who you didn't even work for.
Are you really not able to see what is wrong with your mindset? If not, I think you may have a larger issue.
Employers (and other humans in general) want to see that you are capable of admitting and fixing your mistakes. They want to know that you can reflect on your behavior and appropriately remedy the issue at hand when they give you feedback. What you should be talking about is the fact that you had a bad attitude. You don't believe there was an issue regarding your technical skillset or ability to get along with team members, but instead you went into the internship believing you were more valuable than you actually were and this entire experience has given you the ability to truly humble yourself and reflect on what you need to do differently.
Coming from someone who did not receive an offer, you will never get a job with how you currently think about your internship experience. Good luck man.
"Where I come from, you stick together with family."
What a sentence. I'd really like to know how you got the impression that whatever place you're from cares more about family than whatever place you assume your hypothetical interviewer is from.
Getting no-offered isn't that big a deal. You don't have to come up with some ridiculous alibi like pretending you dont like NYC or pretending you're from some salt-of-the-earth place that others wouldn't get.
Everyone in this business knows the offer process isn't the most meritocratic thing. We all know good people who got no-offered and bad people who got offered. Just own it and you're fine. Most of the time people don't get offered, it has something to do with their maturity being less than ideal, and nothing does more to show improved maturity than just telling the truth and moving forward. People won't be that hard on you if you do that. They will be hard on you if you appear to be bullshitting your way around the truth.
So, literally no fault whatsoever on your end?
For purpose of this post I'm going to refer to IB/MC as "track" jobs. Meaning, they're unique for having clearly defined entry points and because they're generally pursued by people following some sort of a path/track (classic one being Target > IB > PE > MBA > Senior PE > Greatness).
Every year, many top school seniors wonder what are the impacts of falling off this track because they haven't landed a track job. And my answer to every one of them is the same: you can get back on track by landing the most challenging business job you can land. That could be anything that helps you add value to a business . . corp dev, fp&a, marketing, startup stuff, big 4, etc etc etc. There's too many opportunity types to list. In this market I have no doubt your career office is flooded with challenging opportunities that can build your resume.
Then, 1-3 years later, you hit the lateral market for IB/MC and get back on track. Seen it a million times and it has a very high success rate both in terms of success landing the track job, and success/happiness while there.
Its such a common and straightforward solution I'm surprised it doesnt have its own name. The Late Bloomer path or something like that.
+1 for the late bloomer path - definitely a new (better) way of reframing initial career bumpiness as a journey and not a failure.
Why don't you think you got a return offer? Did you not socialize much/skip events? Was your work not good? Did you not have a positive attitude? I think it is important to analyze why you did not receive a return offer.
Adding more fleshed out reasons for not getting a return offer:
There were a variety of reasons. Some were shortcomings on my end, and some were turnoffs about the group that likely manifested in me disliking the group.
A lot of the interns did drugs and got trashed during their free time. This made it hard to socialize with the interns in and outside the office since I was not really interested in popping stims throughout my day. I also was not interested in blowing all my money at clubs and getting tables--I had to save my money for school and for my parents who need help paying billls. Some of the full timers would do drugs in front of me as I came up to them to check in on completed tasks and to get briefed on new tasks
Everyone started out with roughly the same number of staffings, but mine were seemingly way more quiet than other people's. One of my staffings was actually quite active, but the analyst I worked with had been an analyst for 4ish years and he/she was requesting I do really complex valuations. I had a basic understanding of what he/she wanted, but I stumbled in executing. Most of the time he/she gave me a preview on how to do something, but his/her examples were incredibly fast that I couldn't pick up what he/she was doing. Sometimes I asked him/he to give a second example, but his/her fingers were lightning fast. I was stumbling on this stuff while most of my peers were just making presentations look pretty.
Over time, I picked up more staffings and my tasks became more diverse, including presentations and pitchbooks. But these tasks came up for me weeks into the job, and so I of course made some mistakes in terms of formatting and outputting quickly. My peers had no troubles though since they had been doing this all the time for weeks. I probably seemed incompetent since a few weeks into the job I had trouble with simple presentation stuff.
There were some social events at the beginning and end of the summer. Initially, I went to the events but it seemed like full timers were just trying to socialize with the interns they had spent lots of time working with. Since my projects were slow, I had not really worked a lot with anyone. Near the end of the summer, there were more events but I only made short appearances since I felt defeated: people had made the bonds they were going to make, and my projects had all been spotty so I wasn't particularly close with anyone.
Aside from those negatives, I did form good friendships with a couple of interns who were less druggy or non-druggy. So I did appear to have friends--no question here. I just wasn't friends with the "in group" of interns. A little after the halfway point of the summer, I was finally winning: full timers regularly told me equivalents of "good job" and I was asking for more staffings and one-offs, which I was winning at too. But it seems like the decisions makers had made up their minds long ago, based off the first half of the summer's reports. I asked the decision makers around the halfway point if there was a chance for me, and they said possibly if I keep working hard and improving, which I honestly think I did. But I think they just told me that to keep me working, it was probably bs
I'd also just like to add that I don't think I'm weird in any way such that I'm an eyesore or problematic person. Most of my friends consider me very calm and collected, I'm pretty solid looking, I'm in shape, and I dressed neutrally--any prejudices related to these topics don't apply in my opinion.
Thanks so much for the information. That honestly fucking sucks. Does the group typically have a high return offer rate (90%+)?
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