Anyone else's immigrant parents have no idea what they do for a living?
In college, it seemed like half the white frat guys you'd run into came from finance legacies, with their dad being a hedge fund manager, their mom being an M&A lawyer and their uncle running a PE shop.
Meanwhile, my immigrant family members (who are all intelligent doctors/engineers) don't have the slightest clue what I'm doing for a living. I'm pretty sure my mom thinks I'm a financial advisor or an insurance salesman. The closest I could come to explaining investment banking was by describing it as a type of corporate consulting, and now they think I'm like Marty Byrde from Ozark or some shit. And don't even get me started on explaining distressed debt...
Is finance really such an esoteric industry that so many people don't know about it? Feels like everyone on earth knows what a cardiologist does, but nobody without a finance background has a damn clue what a private equity firm even means.
My dad is a petroleum engineer with very little understanding of finance too. I also come from an immigrant community, I think finance is seen as overwhelmingly dull by many people not just immigrants, and not delivering a lot of societal value in the conventional way immigrants saw it being done in their home countries where sophisticated financial players or career paths were unlikely to exist in the first place when they were our age.
This has more to do with socioeconomic background than anything IMO. MY GF is white and her parents still have no idea what I do lol. I've explained it like 6 times and written out charts etc
I feel like some of that’s on you if you tried explaining it to them and they think you’re remotely close to a money launderer for a drug cartel. my parents were the stereotypical immigrant combo engineer/doctor and they had no idea what I did exactly but after a while of them asking questions and me explaining it in reasonable terms they now get the idea of investment banking and even distressed debt! your parents are smart, they’ll get it eventually, even if it takes you working FT for several years. (side note not that you need to be smart to understand investment banking). it’s a really good skillset to be able to explain what you do in terms people at all exposures of finance/lack thereof can grasp
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