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, Alex shares his winding path from a non-target university to breaking into a top

bolds bracket group at BAML in New York. Learn what made him a top ranked analyst and how he

ended up at Premier a top private equity fund

as their first pre-MBA associate, as well as his success and failures once he hopped off

the traditional path. Enjoy.

All right, Alex, welcome to the Wall Street Oasis podcast.

Thanks for having me.

So it'd be great if you could just give the listeners a short summary bio.

Yeah, so I've had a eventful career.

I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, went to the University of Illinois, non-target school,

was initially pre-med, and got the finance bug, and started my career pretty traditional. I did

investment banking at the perfect time in the global financial crisis, ended up getting a gig in large cap private equity.

And then since then, it's been largely non-traditional. I joined, was the first employee,

a of a startup that was successful, ended up selling for $100 million, ran my own hedge fund

for a number of years, and now today am at an esoteric

asset firm, you know, trading in, you know, long-dated receivables. So it's been a long journey,

but it's been fun. Sounds interesting. It's going to be a fun one. So let's go back to

University of Illinois. Why did you end up

there? Was it like, was it good for pre-med or it's like, you know, at a high school, we were like,

you Chicago, forget that. What was going on there? Yeah, I honestly, it was primarily just to save

...