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 WSO Mentor shares his path from a multibraket investment bank to a

middle market private equity firm, what he wishes he did for private equity recruiting,

some unexpected advice on which investment banks to target,

and whether or not he'll get an MBA. Enjoy.

WSO Mentor, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

Yes, happy to be here.

Awesome, man. So it would be great if you could start off with just a quick summary of your background.

Sure. So I grew up in the tri-state area, went to a target school within the realm of Wall Street. But, you know, think along the lines of a Duke,

Boston College, Wake Forest type school, not an Ivy League, but still, you know, really strong

connections to the street, which made the recruiting process, which I'm sure will get into

fairly straightforward for better or for worse.

I got a summer internship in the investment banking group at Barclays in New York,

interned there in one of the coverage or M&A groups,

accepted my full-time offer to return.

So post-college, I did about a year and change at Barclays before leaving to a middle market private equity firm, also based in the New York area,

where I've been for about three years now. Great. And then maybe we could just start off

kind of rewining back to your college days

and the recruiting there for the investment banking. Could you give me a little bit about how

what the process was like? Obviously, you know, you don't have to go into too many details about the

school, but was there a lot of on-campus recruiting and how did that play out? Did you get a high hit rate on

like resume drops or how did that all proceed? Sure. So I'll kind of start high level and then

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