Just saying hi!

Hi everyone! I stumbled upon this forum through a thread about strategic finance and I am so glad I found you guys!

I grew up in China, studied MS. in Finance in Colorado and worked in Denver a bit before I moved to the Bay Area. I worked for about 7 years as a Financial Analyst. Recently I quit my job because my work visa expired, and also because I was a bit burnt out... well, maybe very burnt out.

I have always worked in small Finance teams. I was reporting to the CFO on my last job (stayed there for over 4 years). What I liked about the job was that the responsibilities were very business oriented. There was only one other Finance guy who does all the FP&A for R&D and some other departments, and I am the only person that does all the rest of a Finance function in a private company, such as revenue, margins, bookings, forecasts, deal analysis, process improvements, even inventory/cost analysis and some FP&A for the rest of the departments... I think my boss and the accounting team handles all the banks and debts, I never had to get involved.

What I don't like about the job is that, the career path seems to be very dim, maybe unless I constantly look for new opportunities, in this case, outside of the company because my last employer had little growth each year. Also, I have been looking at a lot of strategic finance roles, and a lot of them prefer people to have management consulting background, which kind of sets the bar a bit high for me.

Currently, I am still doing a lot of reflection on my career. I keep asking myself, why Finance, what am I good at, what are my weaknesses... So, yeah, it is pretty awesome to find this forum, and I am very excited to have more conversations with you all!