Credit? Real Estate? - Help Me Decide
First post here - thank you in advance to anyone who shares their input.
I’m not sure how I should structure my career, what’s realistic, what’s not, who would hire me, and where I should devote my time to grow?
I work for one of the B4 in their Structured Products/Securitization Advisory groups. I’m a first year Associate (Analyst equivalent outside of B4) 9 months out of university. I did not go to a great school and had a less than stellar GPA. Although I had numerous decent quality internships (7bn AUM credit HF, S&T boutique IB, 2 internships with the B4 I work at, and a F500).
I make about 85k~ living in Florida. I work about 90% from home, 50ish hours a week (although this can vary drastically dependent on time of month and year as my work is all transactional).
I work strictly on CLO payment verifications quarterly and Agency MBS payment modeling monthly. Sprinkled in with some CLO effective date work as that comes up.
For the CLO work it’s mainly consists of working out of a pre-built model and running collateral quality tests and cash flow/waterfall modeling and tying these numbers out with the collateral manager/trustee in respect to the governing documents.
For the Agency MBS work, mainly consists of modeling the deal with in house software in conjunction with Excel models and typing out these metrics with the respective investment bank and their accountant.
Now here’s my dilemma
I feel very blessed to have the job, but I want to be more aggressive with my career and do not want to stay to become a Partner at the firm. Mainly because as I grow in the firm it seems you get busier and are severely underpaid considering the other long-hour careers out there. Also, I have a finance degree, whereas 50% of my practice has some sort of accounting degree - I want to be surrounded by more finance folks rather than accountants. The work as a whole valuation/tie-outs is not the most intriguing work and would like to get into something else.
What’s my next logical step? Considering what I’m exposed to CLO/MBS work… do I aim for something RE related? Do I aim for something on the credit side? Do I try to make my way into banking (I’ve seen a few people in my group make this move). Also considering my academic background, is that even feasible?
To further note, I am analytical but not a quantitative person by nature as I was always more of a conceptual thinker. So does this limit some of the more quantitative roles in structured credit (I see a lot of financial mathematics, engineering, etc. in the space).
My apologies as this is a very open ended question - would love to hear any and all feedback.
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