Seeking Advice For Breaking Into ER/AM

Hey Everyone,

Seeking advice on a best path moving forward. In short, my background is that I just completed my Junior year at an admittedly non-target, but improving school in the Southeast. GPA is in the mid-3s, but I have always made it a point to distinguish myself by gaining as much experience and involvement as possible given the aforementioned. I am even starting a new club at my school in Fall that will manage a paper money account as if it was a real, operating fund while also teaching valuable skills to the participants. Members will be split up into analyst teams that conduct research, generate reports, model financials and present their findings so that the group can vote on how to most effectively invest the funds. Then the returns will be documented and compared against the standard benchmarks. It’s very early stage at this point, but the faculty adviser has been trying to get the Department on board with a student-managed portfolio of endowment money for years. He has confidence that if we are able to establish a positive and consistent track record over the next few years, the club could one day evolve into a real student-managed portfolio with actual AUM.

As for experience, I interned with a small, local PE/VC fund during the past school year and just started a new internship at a boutique (and pretty much the only) IB shop in town for this summer, which is big for kids in the school I come from. I’m not especially enthralled with the idea of working IB long-term or even being on Wall Street, but I’m extremely interested in breaking into SS ER and possibly moving into BS or AM after that. So, the point in explaining all of this is that I have reached a bit of the quandary as to what the next steps are that I should take. I am currently slated to graduate next Spring and I’m not sure if I should:

• Get another internship in town, even though what I am doing now is pretty much the best experience you can get, given where I go to school (it almost feels as if I have “topped out” in a way and pretty much anything else would be a step backwards). I could also forego an internship during my senior year and instead focus on my remaining classes and this new club that will be getting off the ground. This would allow me to job-hunt full time during my Sr year and hopefully have a good offer lined up upon graduation, but this carries a risk all its own. I am honestly not even sure how well I stack up against the rest of the field right now.

• Or, I could try to line up some sort of ER or AM internship for next summer and delay my graduation until afterwards. This could be helpful because I do not currently have direct experience in either, and those are the fields I am fervently passionate about and want to immerse myself in after graduation. The downside is that I am ready to get out of school and start working somewhere. And it goes without saying that I would prefer to do that after Spring if I am already qualified enough to get hired somewhere. Like I said, I don’t even care about Wall Street. An offer in Boston, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, etc. would make me just as happy.

Thanks for the help, I genuinely appreciate it.