Confused about megafund exit opportunities

Okay...I'm currently a senior that will be starting FT at a top tier BB (GS, MS). I'm not at a particularly strong target school and have thus worked very hard throughout college to end up where I am. My ultimate goal is to exit into a megafund.

That said, after reading a number of posts on WSO regarding PE exits, I feel that I previously fell into a sense of complacency regarding bulge brackets and the places they enabled analysts to go. In more and more threads, I'm reading about how headhunters really only target the top analysts from GS TMT and MS M&A (of which I am placed in neither), and then too, it's ridiculously competitive to exit into BX, KKR, Carlyle, TPG.

Can someone with actual knowledge once and for all confirm the difficulty of megafund recruiting at bulge brackets? Do these funds and headhunters really consider all analysts not in the two aforementioned powerhouse groups as being "inferior?" Seems a bit ridiculous to me...

Do GS TMT and MS M&A analysts really take all the top megafund exits, leaving MM funds for the rest?

 
Best Response

No, you'll see a good range of BB's and elite boutiques. Many of your questions can be answered by just taking 1 hour, going to the top 50 megafunds and looking up all their profiles of associates and analysts. Do you see 10 GS/MS in a row? No. However, pedigree is important and not being from a target school will hurt you but it shouldn't be too bad.

However if your mentality is KKR/Carlyle or nothing, then you need to reevaluate life. That's like someone saying "harvard or nothing, fuck wharton/yale/stanford/dartmouth/caltech/etc."

 
1styearBanker:
No, you'll see a good range of BB's and elite boutiques. Many of your questions can be answered by just taking 1 hour, going to the top 50 megafunds and looking up all their profiles of associates and analysts. Do you see 10 GS/MS in a row? No. However, pedigree is important and not being from a target school will hurt you but it shouldn't be too bad.

However if your mentality is KKR/Carlyle or nothing, then you need to reevaluate life. That's like someone saying "harvard or nothing, fuck wharton/yale/stanford/dartmouth/caltech/etc."

Great advice on looking up various megafund websites. Had some free time fairly recently and I went through and did this. Saw a lot of names from the "premier" groups on the Street namely, GS TMT, MS M&A, MS Healthcare, CS M&A etc with a sprinkling of people from "lower" BBs such as UBS etc.
 

^^^ agreed. A guy a couple years a head of me exited out of Citi m&a, went to TPG. He had a fairly substantial connection. Even in those top two you mentioned, you still need to network to land a position with the big hitters.

Ace all your PE interview questions with the WSO Private Equity Prep Pack: http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/guide/private-equity-interview-prep-questions
 

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