Anyone else get overwhelmed by their career sometimes?
Title is pretty self explanatory. The whole structured timeline of finance, particularly IB, has been getting to me recently. I'm currently a 2nd year An in coverage and I don't want to stay in banking, but I also don't really know if I want to do PE, PC, Corp Dev, join a startup, or something else.
I'm in a pretty niche industry, that I don't find particularly interesting. I'm not at the age/experience to get an MBA, nor do I really want to drop $400K+ in opportunity cost at this point anyway.
I find myself reading every book under the sun about finance (rise of private debt, LBO investing, sponsor-backed structured financing solutions, start-ups, whatever else I come across) so that I have enough knowledge to take an interview at wherever, but now basically everything I know is miles-wide and inches-deep.
Anyone else ever feel like this?
Maybe I am not in the exact same boat of you. But I do often feel a little overwhelmed by my job. There have been times where I have been working on multiple live deals and feeling completely out of my depth and unable to cope. I feel like there isn’t enough hours in the day to dig into the details of each deal sufficiently to feel confident given the conflicting demands from other deals.
I feel like a lot of people in the Finance world are scared to admit they are out of their depth (given the salary and competition for their job). There is almost a toxic culture of always pretending we are not just okay, but thriving, when in reality we are really struggling to get through the day.
It is only natural to feel overwhelmed by your career from time to time, and I’d go as far as saying that if you’re not somewhat overwhelmed then maybe you could be pushing yourself harder for a more challenging role (if that’s what you want of course).
Happens to me as HF analyst too. When I'm working on multiple ideas and PM is up my ass because he just got a new idea from a fellow hedgie. Though it's more enjoyable than banking work, it still feels like normal work and can get boring sometimes.
what is pc
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I'm always overwhelmed by my career - it's really easy to get caught up in your head about it. My advice to you - embrace it. Start networking at places that interest you, take some interviews... hell, take something that comes up that looks interesting to you. Don't take it TOO seriously to the point that you freeze up - it's a long marathon not a sprint.
The one thing I would recommend is owning your mile wide, inch deep knowledge - there's nothing wrong with that, where people often get into issues is when they try and go deep in a situation with a specialist. Get comfortable with what you know well, be eager to learn and you'll be just fine.
I would say two things.
First is that your career isn't like climbing a mountain, where one slip will send you back to the bottom. At a certain point you've developed a base level of experience and skills that are vastly transferrable. As a junior it's hard to recognize when this happens, because your whole life has essentially been feeling like climbing the mountain - doing well in HS to get into a good college, doing well in college to get into a good bank, doing well at the bank to have good exit opps. That's not really how the real world works to be honest, and most people's careers, even those who stay in banking, aren't either that linear or precarious. It's hard to get out of this mindset and look back on the skills you've built and realize how transferrable and sellable those are to all kinds of other industries and fields when you've been in the rat race for so long and are in a bank whose promotion track seems to replicate that. This may or may not apply to you.
The second thing is that you're probably feeling like this because you've been pushing the ibanking track so hard, and have been so focused on it, that now that you've achieved that goal you're not sure what to do or where to go from here. Everyone has these moments in their career, and it's a good position to be in. You accomplished a goal, gained a great set of skills and incredible resume, and are now intimidated by the amount of doors that are now open to you. Sounds like you know you don't want to do ibanking for the long term, or at least are interested in learning more about other fields you could go into, and the options are endless, certainly much wider than people typically talk about on this forum. All manner of finance / business opportunities are open to you, but also pretty much any other field you want to go into to some extent. Reading won't point you in a direction, TBH. I tried that when I was in your shoes and it got me nowhere. The only thing that really works is talking to people, hearing their stories and getting their insight into what they do and whether it'd be a good fit for you. If you're interested in learning more about startups, go talk to some startup founders, either through your network or just cold email some folks. If you want to learn more about what corpdev is like, reach out to some corpdev folks.
Currently going through what OP is mentioning and reading this made me very optimistic. Thank you for this, Stranger.
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