Stay safe or take risk? Opportunity at GS vs follow the instinct
Hi community,
I am set to finish my 6 months internship in PWM at GS in a couple of weeks, and I currently have three roads in front of me:
- I am interviewing for a position in Sales Support for GSAM in London
- I have been offered a 6-month extension of the internship, with a small possibility for full-time offer in PWM (some conditions within the team will have to happen first)
- Finish my last year of Masters in Finance and keep looking for some other opportunities.
For what concerns me, I like technical topics, and despite the great opportunity, I think that working into sales would not fit my ambitions: I do not want to say yes to GS just because it is GS and because pay is good. I feel it’s the first years of my career and taking some risk at this stage in the hope of finding something more suitable (I feel attracted from S&T, structuring or similar) could be reasonable. My main point is that being Sales not much technical, once you start in there the opportunities to move to other more appealing divisions could be reduced. On the other hand, PWM seems better than AM, since maybe a direct relationship with a client could be more satisfying: at the same time, however, doing 6 more months in a division which is not one of my first choices, and where there is absolutely no uncertainty about a full time offer, seem a kind of time waisted.
I would say that as of now my orientation is towards risk: not accepting the two offers and trying to find something else. However I am obviously hunted by potential regrets, and I’d like to hear your opinion.
I was in sales support for a bulge bracket in NYC and it sucks. Absolutely sucks. It's technically middle office for the sales desk. Booking trades, allocating trades, working with settlements... potential to move into sales, if they like you, that is. But it’s hard because most likely there will be incoming analyst for the sales position. You sit on the trading floor but not much exposure to anything related to the trading desk, quants, etc. unless some equity trader erroneously executed more shares and you tell the sales trader to tell the trader to wind down. You interact with clients a lot. More for middle office related task. In this job, I was getting paid 120K base. Which is definitely on the high end.
Pay is definitely not bad, plus client exposure in sales might add some “fun”. But I like more projects or intellectual stuff, neither of which is involved here. And as I was saying, I do not want to get up every morning doing something which is not stimulating just because it is a BB or because you get paid quite good - it’s more than half of total week time, at least I’d like to do something interesting.
My question is only weather it is me having these perceptions about Sales and Sales Support, or if it is reality.
Any other thoughts?
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