What Would You Choose Out of Undergrad?

If you had an IBD analyst offer from a "Pipar Jeffray, Baird, or William Blair" type bank and a Corporate Development (M&A) analyst offer from a Fortune 250 firm in a growing industry, which would you take and why?

It seems one of the potential end goals for many IBD stints is to jump ship to Coporate Development. So if you could go directly to the end goal given the only IBD offer was from a non-BB firm, would you do it. Obviously the gap between pay would be fairly substantial.

 

I would personally take the Corp Development offer especially if it's not a 2 year stint or for a certain time period. Your modeling skills may lack a bit compared to an IBD analyst but your work life balance will be considerably better. However, if pay is what you're after, then IBD of course.

 

Entirely depends on what work you want to do...assuming you're interested in corp dev but your wording makes it sound like you're only considering it because it's something lots of people do after IB and not because it's something you want to do.

People need to keep things in perspective - what are your goals? WB, for example, is a great bank in Chicago and you definitely have exit ops from there.

 
Best Response

I think you mean doing corp dev out of undergrad vs. the IB job.

If your end goal is corp dev anyway and you're dead set on it, then in one sense, there's not really any advantage to doing IB, but one of the main draws of IB is that it gives you lots of experience (emphasis on churning out lots of deals, not necessarily just good ones) and exposes you to a lot of different careers that you'll have access to (you'll deal with PE guys, debt guys, corp dev guys, etc.) There's definitely value in optionality, especially early in your career.

You should also consider the specific corp dev role. Since each company is looking for different things and set up differently, your experience could be a lot more variable relative to banking, where it's a pretty known quantity what you'll be getting out of it.

Note that I'm not really arguing that you should do IB in this case so much as trying to offer a counterpoint and something to think about.

 

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