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chisness, are you aware of the differences between those fields you mentioned? Specifically, what type of hedge fund strategy do you want to get into?

Most hedge funds use trading as their principal strategy, although there are still a good amount of those based on fundamental analysis. Banking will teach you nothing except how to model on Excel (which I'm not judging, I'm just letting you know what you'll be learning). A typical saying used among IB'ers is that a monkey could do what they do, it just requires close to every waking hour of your life. Most Ivy league business grads go into banking ONLY due to the exit oppourtunities (i.e. hedge funds, venture capital, etc.). It's not that they feel they'll be learning anything particularly groundbreaking.

The first thing you need to do is figure out what you specifically want to do, since it sounds like you're in your last year of school. From what I gathered, the only reason you want to get into hedge funds is for the money (since you don't know the specific type of work this could entail). Choosing a specific career path based on money is a terrible idea, as you will probably be miserable and not good at what you do.

To give you some background on myself: I was a senior at an average private university last year with good grades but no idea what I wanted to do. After researching different fields within finance, I decided I wanted to get into equity research (fundamental analysis). I ended up getting into a very good institutional investment management firm (buy side is much harder to get into out of college then the sell side, even though it pays less in most cases), even though a hedge fund was my goal (hedge funds are even harder to get into). With a little bit of luck and the help of poker, I managed to get offered an analyst position at a hedge fund two weeks ago, where I am now.

Long story short, if you want to get into the fundamental analysis side of research, look into buy-side firms or hedge funds that utilize that strategy. If you want to get into trading, I suggest looking into SIG, a trading firm based in Philadelphia; I don't think there is any better place to start (in fact, a guy that used to help run SIG started his own hedge fund right next to it; like SIG, he will ask you poker-related probability questions; he's very intense, though, and I wouldn't suggest looking into his fund unless you are extremely good with math). With some experience, you'll be able to get the attention of hedge funds using quant/trading strategies. In regards to investment banking: if you have a long-term goal of a joining a hedge fund (whatever strategy), ONLY enter IB if it is a bulge bracket firm. This might be tough since you're not in Ivy league, but still possible with a top 20 school. If you need me to answer anything else, let me know.