college pressure to do banking

how crazy is it that i’m at a target school and my schools arguably best investment club but don’t wanna work 80 hours a week. like i feel insanely ungrateful but i don’t wanna 14 hours a day on average, but i feel like a chud if i don’t especially cause im set up on a path to place decently well. any advice would be much appreciated on alternative fields with decent comp or slept on fields that have 50-70 hour work weeks instead of 80-100 like banking.

17 Comments
 

Don't wanna come off a chud to your peers? Go break a leg landing an offer at like Jane Street or Citadel / start a company that gets admitted into YC. If you must mog others to feel something - plenty of ways to do so if IB is the baseline. Also at the end of the day, don't forget that human's worst addiction is validation from others. Don't stress - ur already at a great place.

 

Agree with above.  Stop trying to impress everyone - You'll never find true fulfillment down that path.  

Alternatively, I'd add that there are plenty of careers that offer great WLB, Comp, and intellectual fulfillment (although annual comp for most will be at a discount to banking, they can offer a steep premium to banking pay/hour)

  1. Corporate Banking
  2. Management Consulting (still can be bad hours including travel)
  3. RX Consulting (Also can have brutal hours at peak times, but is more cyclical and averages much less than banking when annualized)
  4. Credit Investing (difficult to break into out of UG, but doable from the right schools)
  5. Asset Management
  6. Law School --> Big Law --> In house Corp. Law (Obviously can still see extreme hours in BigLaw, but virtually all firms aside from Kirkland & Watchtell offer considerably better hours, on average, than banking)
 

Ended up doing the IB path anyway, but feel your sentiment in a way that I think may others don’t. Sacrificed a lot - more than most - to get the prestigious IB internship, then did it and thought I should pivot or even renege the offer. Shiny signing bonus figures and all, I ended up not but I encourage every kid I talk to to look at alternative options before being deadset on IB bc I think it’s too late for me but not for others.

 

Didn't mean private credit but that's def been stressing me out recently too :) 

liquid credit is public credit investing like HY bonds, BSLs, CLOs. comp is on par w/ banking and I'm working 60-65 max out of UG. Only thing is it's hard to find the good seats as no one really leaves

 
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My view on university (with hindsight) is that this is the time where you should really try and grow as a person and find out what you like and don’t like.

Be a wildland firefighter for a summer, join the army reserves, try working with your hands as a contractor building houses. Sure throw a corporate job in there too.

What I’m trying to say is that you don’t want to become one of these disillusioned kids blindly following the IB / consulting path because that’s “right” or “prestigious”.

Figure out who you are and what you want out of life and then you can make a call. Because I can tell you for a fact that a lot of the folk in IB wish they had done what I wrote above.

 

the benefit of exploring is that you’ll find what you enjoy AND are talented at. the book “Range” explores this topic.
from the description:
“David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one.”

 

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