Burnt out second year analyst wondering what to do

It’s all about how severe your burnout is and how much you like your current job. A few things:

• you could be in a crap month and get a lighter schedule where you will feel better
• You could be coming to terms with/ discovering your values and realizing “the grind” is possible for you, but you don’t want it. This is a good thing to learn in the long run, but can be tough when you are going through it
• You could be burned out

My advice is a few things:

1. take vacation (a week where you don’t touch your phone, travel somewhere, and see friends/family can do wonders for your perspective)
2. Ask for unpaid leave at the conclusion of a project. Just let your team know you will be taking x amount of time off for unpaid leave and that you need to reevaluate.
3. Look for another exit with less hours. From banking the most common ones are Corp dev (actually can be a very cool job despite what people on this forum say), or bschool. FP&A is also an option, but wouldn’t recommend it.

One thing I would say is I think it’s very easy to think you want the extreme of no hours after a banking stint when actually that might not be the case and you just want some control of your life. The analogy I always use is summer vacation—summer vacation for most kids is like 10 weeks and usually you can’t even remember the year prior once the new school year starts. Keep that in mind that honestly only 3 weeks of vacation might actually be all that is needed for you to wish to get back on the horse and be psyched about finance again. I’d ask yourself why you are unhappy right now and try to backsolve.