Why this group (M&A vs coverage vs leveraged finance)?

I'm interviewing for M&A specifically, so I'll frame it that way — though I'll be honest that I considered LevFin seriously and want to explain why I landed where I did.

M&A is the seat I want because the work product is the negotiation. In coverage, you're often building toward a pitch — the value-add is the relationship and the strategic thinking, but the actual transaction execution gets handed off. In LevFin, you're optimizing one part of the capital structure, deeply, but you're a specialist input into someone else's process. M&A is the seat where you sit with the deal from sign to close, see every workstream — financing, diligence, regulatory, integration — and your output is the structure that defines whether the deal happens and at what value. That's the apprenticeship I want.

I considered LevFin because the technical depth on the financing side is real and the muscle you build is portable across PE and credit. What pushed me to M&A was a conversation last summer with a sponsor MD who told me — bluntly — that the best junior bankers he hired were the ones who could think about a deal across all four levers (operations, capital structure, governance, exit), and the M&A seat exposed you to all four earlier. That stuck with me.

Within M&A specifically, I'm drawn to your group's mix of corporate strategics and sponsor work. I want to learn both negotiation styles — strategics are about strategic logic and integration, sponsors are about structure and IRR — and your deal flow is roughly 60/40 across the two, which is rarer than people realize.