How can I become a Finance professor?

I do not find joy or happiness working in the industry and do not see myself staying in the fin services industry for the long term. I have always liked teaching and writing research papers so naturally I'd like to be a professor or college teacher. I might even work with TTS or WSP with the Finance and Accounting training.

My entire college experience was being a T.A, tutor, and research assistant for business classes and I loved every single second of it.

I always valued the few professors that made learning awesome and I want to be one of those professors that truly had passiom for teaching and learning.

How can I use my industry experience (tentatively 5 years across IB and REPE) to become a professor or university lecturer?

16 Comments
 

Finance prof at my target has net worth > $20 million, He earned it with his fund. You can definitely be successful and be a finance professor after

 

I know a professor at my ivy who was a BB banker for ~10 years and now teaches at my school. Know another professor that does PE and teaches a seminar once a week. Both are alumni so that’s a huge aspect I think, but neither have advanced degrees or anything. I’d focus especially on your school and just reach out to an alumni contact expressing interest in teaching. I’m sure they’d love for someone with industry experience to teach one class, and from there you can probably spin it into a full time job

 

if you'd like to be an academic rather than clinical professor of finance, a PhD in finance from a business school (or possibly just economics) would be required. you'd need a bit of a math background to get in, considering graduate level finance is really economics and that's a heavily quantitative field, but if you already have some research experience that's a plus. a master's or MBA wouldn't be required for that path, although many applicants have master's degrees.

 

Yeah you need a pretty legit math background for a PhD in finance or econ or even accounting I think at a reputable place. You need the PhD if you want to be in a tenure track position doing research. Honestly that path doesn't sound like you from what you wrote.

If you want to focus more on teaching, you can be like a clinical faculty member or lecturer and I think you could become better compensated if you create some sort of new successful program for students. That path isn't bad if you're at a reputable school and you're really involved in a lot of stuff but I know for a fact the comp isn't likely to become more than 150k from what I looked at. You can check the comps for any public uni if you're curious.

 
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