Leaving IB for Phd in Environmental Engineering
What the title says. Writing this for those of you seeking to leave finance for scientific research. Do not let these recruiters / MDs fool you with the flashy clothes, cringey business cards, and empty bonus promises. It’s all meaningless bullshit.
I’m grateful for my years in IB but am seeking to contribute actual meaningful value to society, rather than just moving money around and “advising companies” lol. My engineering research focus will be in food and water security. My goal is to make food and water more sustainably abundant and accessible and help push humanity forward. Interested in transforming contaminated water into drinkable water and transforming types of waste into food. Idealistic for sure - as are many of society’s other great ideas. Even if I don’t achieve my “goal” in the foreseeable future, I can still advance science and make discoveries, which is the beauty of scientific research.
Start classes in a week and am very excited. Will this program take me about 5 years? Yes. Is that a significant opportunity cost? Of course. But if my family and I can make ends meet, that’s all that matters. I don’t need a $1k pair of Ferragmos, an expensive boomer suit to feel “important,” or some other material bullshit.
Sure, I could make millions and then “donate” it. Or I could contribute my human capital towards something I can truly be proud of. Also, the way senior management handled the economic downturn at my bank was quite repulsive (i.e., all about the CEO’s image).
Feel free to ask any questions.
Sounds interesting. What are your goals after? How could you justify the enormous opportunity cost?
Good question. Tough to pin down a specific position 5 years ahead of time but thinking of going straight to an engineering firm, R&D at agriculture company, or academia.
The opportunity cost is significant but I take a long term view of my life and am very stimulated by this subject so I’m going for it. My family and I will be able to make end’s meet so I have no problem going down this path.
@OP, good luck. I come from the env engineering > corp strat > corp dev side of one of the areas you're interested in, drop me a PM in case interested in chatting.
Interesting. My only reservation would be making a decent living.
Then again, PhDs are funded by the government, so if you have the passion why not go for it
Not tryna defend IB but I hope you don't get disillusioned after seeing the rat's race academia has become.
You sound quite immature.
Let's see how you feel about it after 5 years of PhD and 5 years of post doc.
For what it's worth, my opinion is that it may be the right choice for you to leave for academia, but BS'ing abt ferragamo shoes is not the right attitude. Mature people understand the importance of advising CEOs of companies on corporate finance or strategic matters AND the importance of doing research and teaching in hard or soft sciences. "Holier than thou" attitude is a sign of immaturity.
screen name lol
I wish you well, and it’s a fascinating subject.
That said, I went to a university that had the top environmental engineering PHD program in the country and was / am friends with a lot of those guys and gals. 90% end up at the big engineering / consulting firms like ERM doing private equity due diligence on oil and gas, infra and chemicals deals. Nothing wrong with that but you’re still a cog in the deal machine only removed from any strategic decision making. I strongly recommend you stay off your moral high horse about contributing to society because you’ll very likely end up beholden to money (even if you are an academic doing research, guess who pays for it?).
Also, Ferragamo for the ties but never the shoes, Ideally shoes are custom John Lobb (or whomever your favorite cobbler), but Bally works in a pinch.
Also if you to meet real money grubbing a@sholes, you should meet the ones in big agriculture - Bayer / Monsanto, ADM, Cargill, Bunge. They make investment bankers look like Mother Teresa.
Like I said, it’s a fascinating area and I wish you well, but don’t be naive about what )oure getting into.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysine_price-fixing_conspiracy
https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/24/bayer-109bn-settlement…
https://civileats.com/2019/01/11/the-sobering-details-behind-the-latest…
Tell me your only has job been banking without telling me your only job has been banking.
I'll go IPO the next Tesla while you're busy teaching community college classes. Thx for the contribution to society.
EDIT: I'm just being a jerk but really writing this as a response to the tone of your post. The financial system is not as useless as you claim and college professors / researchers are not as useful as you seem to think.
Good luck but remember that there are a lot of folks out there wasting taxpayer dollars to spend 30 years studying the effects of global warming on the mating habits of squirrels in Montana.
The only good thing human beings have ever done is protect the biosphere against asteroids. Have many of them are needed to do that? Save the other species instead.
This guys trying to get us to eat the bugs… not gonna happen!!!
You're getting a lot of hate for being honest about transitioning out of IB. I hope it all works out for you. One day I hope to leave the finance world behind, like many of us. If you think you're making the world a better place working in M&A congrats, you have lost all traces of sanity. While I don't dislike the work I do and find it genuinely interesting, I hope to position myself well enough to leave finance for good and work at some sort of non-profit.
Kudos to you for realizing there is more to life than the largest apartment, next shiny car, [insert other cliches about things bankers chase].
One last thought, it would be cool to update this post every few months with a brief reflection on the following;
1. Are you happy with the decision you made
2. Are you financially stable or relatively strained
3. Have you now found that you have more time to invest in your personal life / family / hobbies
4. Do you feel lighter given that you changed how you allocated 60+% of your waking hours
5. Eventually, when you do look for FT work, what does your salary range look like. Obviously it likely wont be IB money, but I would bet the salary is more than enough to raise a family on.
Hey, I am genuinely interested, I going the opposite and reversing my Ph.D. -- Quant -- IB - MD, am wrapping up my doctorate and series exams. Why not do both brother and create your own firm regional boutique firm? Respectively, to self-actualizing after 40 years of experience, is there anything that would stop you from achieving mastery of both fields? I might so mean physicists & ECE who work in IB and get their MBA, and have already done couple internships. Do you plateau after a couple of years? I dmed you, hmu brother would love to learn.
You intend to go from being a Quant to IB? Are you referring to the IBD division or S&T?
IB- Bio/LifeScience! or Tech IB or Start my own BB Firm(s) based on Tech.
You come across just a little bit pompous in this post although I don't believe that was your intention. Chalk it up to excitement and idealism. You put in your time and have every right to hate IB.
The thing is, I know plenty of people who thought they were escaping the grind to go do something "noble" or humanitarian only to discover they were facing the same sorts of egos, politics, abuse, power trips, and pecking order bullshyt they had just left. Whether it's been Think Tanks, Teaching, Academia, NGOs, Med school, Social Impact funds, etc. their complaints have all been the same. One of my friends quit a gig at the World Bank last year after leaving Consulting; he swore he'd found his "calling", right up until the bureaucracy hit him at full speed.
But all things considered, it's a privilege to be in a position to pursue your intellectual interests and potentially drive some sort of measurable impact on your terms. I imagine once the politics, turf wars, jockeying for position, and backstabbing begin the halo of the good you could still do will keep you invested. Just don't kid yourself about what awaits you on the other side.
In some ways, it's actually more hurtful and disturbing. If you're around a bunch greedy sharks and you find out that they have sharp elbows.....well yeah, no shit. If you find out that the people are supposed to saving the world and caring about people are really assholes and downright petty on their way to the top at the World Bank or academia, I think it stings more in some ways and makes you jaded really quick.
This is probably a cynical take, but think about the ego one must have to sincerely believe that they're "elevating the human condition" or "saving the world" or some shyt. Once you believe yourself to be that important or vital and obtain a commensurate title to match, it's inevitable you'll treat people you view as less talented, irrelevant, or unimportant like shyt. And anyone who dares challenge you or your status or push back in any way would find themselves in immediate conflict with you. It's why these do-gooder fields tend to be rigidly hierarchal and conformist in their own right- particularly academia. You go against the grain or question anything and you're immediately discredited, marginalized, and viewed as a "crank" by your peers.
These fields draw insecure people in need of validation/adoration/affirmation in droves. And the political animals with the sharpest elbows ascend. Those personalities tend to be extremely toxic and petty - at least bankers will eat their own in pursuit of a buck. That's tangible. The academic and service communities do it over ego.
I first got a taste of this during my TFA interviews. I had never seen a more prestige-obsessed group of social climbing psychos (until WSO, anyway ha!), ostensibly under the guise of "doing good".
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