Thinking of trying to break in - what is my best shot as a PhD in my early 40s?

Hi all,

Just joined on the advice of a friend (thanks Rob).

Here's my situation: after spending my twenties and thirties in graduate school and then trying to make it as a professor, I realized a few years ago that it was just not going to happen and I cut my losses. After a bit of a bad patch, I've found myself in an admin job at a university, overseeing the administration of some research grants.  I've been there about two and a half years now.

This past spring, I applied and was admitted to a part-time MBA program at another university. It's not first tier, but not bargain basement either—top 50 school, decent alum network. (My employer is footing 80% of the bill and I got a scholarship covering another chunk, so my out-of-pocket expenses are going to be about $10k total.)  The initial plan was that this would speed me on my way to higher level university grant admin jobs down the line.  But in the last month or so, I've been toying with the idea of leaving academic admin altogether and trying to break into something in finance.

I'll admit that the main reason I'm thinking of doing this is compensation, but I have also found the 'financial planning' elements of my current work to be the most interesting, and think I could enjoy working with money full-time.  It may be a crazy pipe dream but even if it is I kind of want to take a shot at it.

(a) Is this entirely stupid? and (b) If it's not entirely stupid, what way 'in' would you recommend? What facets of the finance world are most accessible to 'non-traditional' job-seekers?

A few miscellaneous strengths and weaknesses, as I see them, to my case:

Strengths:

• Ivy League undergrad
• Highly-ranked graduate school (not Ivy, but well regarded in my field and also consistently a top-20 school overall).
• I'm smart (except for career choices) and flexible, and I can still pick up new skills quickly. I've had to teach myself Python, R, and SQL for various parts of my current job, with no background in computers, and I've done pretty well.
• I'm good at quantitative analysis, although my resume doesn't really show it.
• I'm great at qualitative research, and my resume shows it.
• My existing professional network is largely unhelpful here, obviously, but I'm pretty good at network-building. I do have a few friends in the field I can lean on as I try to find a way in.
• My sights are not set high: I know it's too late to make the ultramegabucks. But even a fairly mediocre finance career would still pay more than I can possibly get going down my current path; except for a few outliers, the ceiling in my current line of work is $130-150k in total comp.

Weaknesses:

• Age is the huge one. I turn 40 in January, by the time I finish this degree I'll be 42. That Ivy League degree is from 2007. I'm worried my resume will be summarily rejected on these grounds alone.
• Little quantitative or finance background on the resume. My undergrad degree and my PhD are both in history.
• I still don't fully know my way around the different sectors of finance as a profession, although I'll be fixing this over the course of the first year of my degree.
• Fairly thin work history over all. I did do six years of white collar grunt work out of undergrad, but then I spent ages 27-34ish in a PhD program, and 34-36 doing low-paying postdocs and lecturerships. There's actually quite a lot of work writing, researching, and teaching in those years, but I'm not sure it'll be seen that way.
• I've got a family to think of; a four-year-old and a one-year-old. My wife is supportive of this idea and knows the impact that it could have on my time, but while I can picture working 50-60-hour weeks, 80+-hour-weeks are out of the question except for a very-short-term thing.
• My degree is part-time, and I can't afford to leave my job, so summer internships and the like are off the table, if they'd even take a 40-year-old intern.

Given all of this - what would you do?