For the Money

I'm going to be honest. I'm in this for the money. I see what these guys make in a year, and all I can say is "wow, wouldn't that be nice." It's not like I come from poverty. I always got what I wanted on holidays and such. My parents always made decent money. As I've grown older they made it more apparent how hard it is to survive in the middle class. They made too much so I couldn't get any help in for school, but they didn't make enough where life was any easier. Call it financial purgatory. It was grind. I've seen my mother cry and yell over money three times. I told myself that wouldn't happen to me and if I could, I was going to do whatever I could to help while they were around. Even if I could help with the mortgage, I would feel like I was giving something back. When it came time to choose what I wanted to do, I knew I wanted to do something with high income possibilities. As a millennial, the cost of living has never been higher. In fact, WSJ reported that millennia's are living at home more now because cost of living is so high. I needed something where I could support myself. I chose medicine at first, thankfully I was only taking GE's at the time. Doctors help and people like doctors and I could make a lot of money while I was helping people, nice gig right? I envisioned being a modern day House. Eh too much school. Start making over $200,000 a year once you're out of medical school debt after what? Maybe ten years? No thanks. My father is a mathematician at a state school. He works with a lot of business majors. One day, he told me all of his ex-students were making great money, more than any doctor. He said most of them ended up in finance. Right then and there, I decided to be a business major. I started asking more and more about the field he had little knowledge about, until he told me that his cousin used to work for Goldman. He told he used to work there and retired before he was 35. They gave him some big ridiculous retiring bonus and he called it quits. He did some consulting work in London and had three houses. (Before you say that's my in, he worked at Goldman 40 years ago, its doubtful he's any help now, things change.) I'm now going into my third year at a non-target state school. I'm still focused on making money, My parents instilled in me the work ethic it takes to succeed. I've always been able to "out work" people. My first jobs were manual labor, working in god awful summer heat type jobs cleaning roofs and restoring buildings with fire damage. When I look on these forum discussions, and talk about the "dog days of interning/analyst", and how some people are treated at the entry levels, I get slightly intimidated. I don't mind paying my dues. I'm willing to do whatever it is; fetch coffee, make 10000 different copies of a excel document or stay until two in the morning making tedious changes to a power point. I've done worse, I keep my head down, and I work. That's how I was raised. Here's the thing, I'm definitely not the smartest in this field. Finance terminology confuses me even though I read endless articles and books. As a economics major, the material is interesting no doubt. I figure economics is how the world works in a monetary, tangible, financial point of view. It interests me, but I don't have an undying passion for this world. In my head I hear my fathers voice, "you can get pretty good, close to great by just working hard. To be great you need talent, but you can pretty close to great with just outworking people." Is the desire to be rich enough for this job? I can endure getting shitted on by whatever supervisors I have, I can out work whatever silver spoon fed ivy target school brat next to me. But will that be enough? Can I be in it this industry with work ethic and just for the money? I mean, isn't that why most of us are here, for the money?

Yours.