Burnt out of the rat race after Summer
Genuinely feeling so burnt out after my summer and at the point where I'm thinking of pivoting away from finance entirely. It just feels like an endless cycle of clawing your way up the ladder. I'm sure many can relate to the sleepless nights in highschool turning to sleepless nights at your target school/ivy turning to sleepless nights at your internship to get a return offer and just imagining it's going to be more non-stop grinding for ib and pe for 5-10 more years just seems insane to me.
I get it i get it, i'm spoiled for not immediately being grateful at the chance of a mid six figure salary 5 years into my career but if we're being honest, could you even say half of the associates at blackstone and goldman are genuinely happy? Everyone I've spoken to seems miserable and has complained to me about wanting to quit for the last 2 years but stayed because of opportunity cost of leaving. What is the end goal of it all for you guys? Saving a million by the time you're 30? Is that really worth not feeling happiness for nigh a decade? Losing out on the experiences, personal and intellectual growth, or even just the physical health that you can't maintain in this role? Abusing stimulants just to finish a BS pitch the MD wanted next morning over and over until you literally have heart problems? I feel like a lot of people in banking would've been a much better fit going into tech, swe, or even academia rather than banking, and that many are blindly guided toward this path by incentives that disappeared from this industry decades ago.
Everything in life is a spectrum. you can still find roles in finance with great wlb that pay ok. for instance you can do more middle market stuff / product groups that have much better wlb. for instance ecm and dcm is pretty chill
I’ve been looking for ECM opportunities for FT but haven’t been able to land interviews
Not here to argue that finance is for you at all (it sounds like it's not), but this is not the first time I've seen this complaint about being on the hamster wheel since HS non-stop grinding and I gotta ask. Didn't you get the internship offer a full 18 months before the internship? Maybe you got off cycle and I'm missing the mark, but presuming you were on cycle then what was so hard during that 18 month stretch that you feel like you're still burned out and at wits end of constant sleepless nights? If it's school you're doing it wrong. But if 18 months of not grinding followed by 10 weeks of grinding burned you out, then yeah it might not be for you.
Nah dude screw what these guys are saying - life is too short for12 hours straight of PowerPoint. We were meant for more. You have one life on the earth.
Some people are just not cut out for it
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