A Message to Students Who Think this Job Will Fix Their Life

If you are a student recruiting for banking right now and some part of you believes that getting the job will finally make everything else feel right, I want to tell you something I wish I understood earlier.

Before finance, I was a very different person. I was extremely awkward, lonely, depressed, not particularly confident, and honestly did not think of myself as especially smart. I did not really have a strong sense of what I was good at or where I was going. Studying finance changed a lot of that for me. For the first time, I found something I could become good at through effort. I developed a great understanding of accounting and valuation. Eventually, the more competent I became, the more confident I became, and that confidence started carrying into the rest of my life. I became more outgoing. I got better at talking to people. I became more ambitious. I started believing I was capable of things I previously would have assumed were for other people.

Finance genuinely helped me. I do not want that point to get lost.

Eventually, that path took me to investment banking in New York. I interned here first and am now a first-year analyst. In a lot of ways, it was exactly what I had spent years wanting: the city, the office, the pressure, the people, the deals, the late nights, the feeling that what I was doing mattered. During my internship, my life became unbelievably simple. Wake up, go to the office, work, learn, screw something up, fix it, get better, go home, sleep, repeat. There was always something in front of me. Someone needed something from me. I knew what mattered. I knew if I had done well. I knew if I had let someone down. I was completely engaged.

And then something happened that I think permanently changed my relationship with banking. I started doing well.

People noticed. I got good feedback and started feeling trusted. I felt like I was becoming useful to the team. The second that happened, I was hooked. That is the closest comparison I can make, but banking started to feel like a drug.

You take the hit once and suddenly you want the next one. A senior person tells you that you did a great job and you carry that feeling for the rest of the day. You get staffed on something important and suddenly you feel like you matter. You get trusted with more work and it feels like proof that you are becoming someone. Then you want more. More responsibility. More praise. More difficult work. Better deals. Better groups. Better firms. More money. More status.

And once you have experienced that feeling, it is very hard to go back to a normal life where nobody is constantly measuring you, needing you, praising you, or giving you another rung to climb. The highs are real. The problem is that your tolerance goes up. What used to make you happy stops being enough. An internship offer becomes normal. Then you need the return offer. Then you need to prove yourself full-time. Then the better bank. Then PE. Then the better fund. Then the promotion. There is always another hit available.

I did not have much time to wonder whether I was happy. At the time, I thought that meant I was happy.

When my internship ended and I went back to school, normal life suddenly felt incredibly flat. University felt slow. A lot of social drama felt pointless. I would wake up and not know what I actually wanted to do with the day. Things that were supposed to be enjoyable did not feel that enjoyable. I stopped drinking because the emotional crash afterward could leave me feeling awful for days. I spent too much time on short-form content and pornography because at least those things gave me some immediate stimulation, and then I would feel worse afterward. I kept looking for something else demanding enough to throw myself into. Golf. Cooking. Travel. Learning something new. Anything that could make me feel as engaged as I had during the summer.

Eventually I had to admit something to myself that I really did not like: maybe I was not just missing banking. Maybe I was missing being too busy to feel bad.

That is a very different thing.

Now that I am back in New York as a first-year analyst, I understand the pull even more. The structure is back. The pressure is back. People need things from me again. There is always a next task, a next deadline, a next chance to prove myself. And a lot of the time, I feel good here. That is exactly what makes me cautious about it.

Finance had improved my life enormously. It gave me confidence, competence, friends, ambition, and a sense of purpose I had not really had before. But it had not fixed me. I still had the same underlying problems. I had just become much better at functioning around them.

I think ambitious people need to be very careful here, because finance is unusually good at giving you external proof that you matter. There is always another internship, another offer, another bank, another promotion, another deal, another bonus. If you are insecure or unhappy, there is an incredibly seductive story you can tell yourself: I just need to accomplish the next thing.

You can spend your entire twenties doing that. And maybe you will become extremely successful. But there is no guarantee you will become any better at being alone on a Saturday afternoon with nothing urgent to do.

That is the part I am trying to take more seriously now, and it is the advice I would give to students younger than me.

Go out and actually have experiences with people. I do not mean force yourself to drink or go to clubs if you hate it. I mean do things that become memories. Take trips. Have dinners that run too long. Go somewhere stupid with your friends because someone suggested it at midnight. Say yes to things occasionally even when they do nothing for your resume.

Spend as much time as you can with the people you genuinely love. Your parents, siblings, closest friends, whoever those people are for you. There will always be another finance club meeting, another stock pitch, another networking event, another coffee chat. Some of those things matter. Most of them matter far less than you think they do when you are 19. I promise you that missing dinner with someone you love so you can sit in a classroom with twelve other undergraduates debating the appropriate terminal multiple for a waste-management company is not always the optimal allocation of your time.

Take care of your body. Work out. Eat properly. Sleep when you can. Do not treat being unhealthy as evidence that you are serious. Banking will take enough from your health without you voluntarily destroying the rest of it beforehand.

And spend time around normal people. Have friends who don't know what Evercore is and talk to people who could not care less where you are interning. Spend time with people who are teachers, engineers, artists, nurses, tradespeople, athletes, whatever. Finance can become an unbelievably small world that convinces you it is the entire world.

Nobody outside this bubble cares about your league tables. Nobody normal knows which boutique supposedly has better exits. Most people will not become more impressed with you because your bank moved up three spots on WSO. That perspective matters even more once you start working, because banking is very good at shrinking your world until the office feels like the only thing that exists.

I am not saying any of this because I have figured it out. I very much have not. I am a first-year analyst. I am still in the middle of it. I still love parts of banking. I love New York. I love opening my laptop and knowing exactly what I need to do. I love walking home completely exhausted but feeling like the day counted for something. I still get a rush when someone senior trusts me with something difficult or tells me I did good work.

That is exactly why I am trying to build more of a life outside of it now.

I do not want the only version of myself that feels good to be the version answering emails at midnight. I do not want to need someone else’s deadline to feel useful. I do not want a quiet day to feel like emptiness. And I do not want to get to 40, finally slow down, and realize I became excellent at my career without ever learning how to live when work was not consuming me.

Finance gave me something incredibly valuable. It gave a lonely, awkward, insecure kid evidence that he could actually become good at something. That changed the way I saw myself, and I will always be grateful for that. But it did not fix everything. No career can.

So chase banking if you want it. Work hard. Get technically excellent. Be ambitious. Take pride in being good at what you do. Just do not sacrifice every part of your life that makes you a person in order to become really good at being a banker.

The job can give you purpose, confidence, money, incredible experiences, and a career you are proud of.

You still have to build the rest yourself.