Hello and welcome. I'm Patrick Curtis, your host and Chief Monkey, and this is the Wall Street Oasis podcast. Join me as I talk to some of the community's most successful and inspirational members to gain valuable insight into different career paths and life in general. Let's get to it.

In this episode, member JDS 07 shares her path to joining a top private equity fund as an analyst

right out of undergrad. We cover a wide range of topics in this episode, including what she learned

during her bulge bracket investment banking

internship and why she wanted to skip investment banking to go straight to PE, what she's seeing

in the deal landscape, how her firm does diligence, and how she is specifically involved, and also

detailed advice on how to prepare for the super competitive private equity recruiting process.

Enjoy.

Enjoy. for joining the Wall Street Oasis podcast. It's my pleasure, Patrick.

Yeah.

So I've been part of the community for a while, so very happy to be able to share my background.

Awesome.

Yeah, so could you give the users and the listeners a just quick summary of where you came from and what you're doing now?

Yeah, so I originally was an immigrant, currently now a citizen, grew up in a few different

places and went to a target school based in the Northeast.

There, I participated on campus recruiting, Dodd and internship with the Borgasbarker Bank in a well-known

investment banking group did my summary internship there but decided to transition full-time to

direct private equity which is what I want to do so now I'm with a pretty well-known firm

we just raised our fifth fund doubled our fund size from our previous

fund, and I've been looking at a bunch of companies in a broad array of industries.

Great. So you kind of skipped banking altogether. So you did it over the summer. Was there something about that experience that made you not want to do it? Or do you always know you wanted private equity?

So I always knew I want to do private equity. And for me, it was a choice between getting into private equity out of undergrad with a really good analyst program as well as a

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