Career Advice for 24yo who will be in FP&A

Hello!

So I recently accepted an offer for a Finance Analyst role at a healthcare startup. I am passionate about the healthcare industry since I was pre-med during undergraduate but decided to switch out of medicine last minute. The role seems very much like a typical FP&A role but the CFO told me that my role and the team would be crucial in making strategical decisions for the startup. What he said really appealed to me because I am more interested in strategy than reporting lol. 

My question is what kind of career path should I take? To be quite honest, I think corporate strategy appeals to me the most out of all the career paths people typically follow. From what I understand, most people go to business school and then either go do MBB consulting or investment banking and then try to go PE/corp dev roles. Would business school be the best option for me? The comp for my new job as an analyst is ~$100K, so I'm not sure if the Biz-school ROI is that great, given potential raises/promotions/changing jobs. 

I also just took the CFA Level 1 exam in July. Think I did well on it, but I'll see in September. I read that the CFA designation is only useful if you are in asset management already; however, I will still take the other two exams because I genuinely enjoy learning the material (yeah I know I have no life haha). I am also pretty experienced in both SQL and Python, but I am not interested in data analyst roles because it doesn't seem interesting to me.

Overall, I am pretty lost about would be the best path for me. I have always followed the pre-med path (volunteering, shadowing, research, MCAT, etc.) so now I feel like I am wandering around aimlessly. Any advice would be immensely helpful. Thanks!

 
 

If you are going into a startup, make sure you get equity or a path to it. The salary is nice but as someone who did the start up thing (First Wave Hire -> Executive over 6.5 years), you end up killing yourself so you need to make sure you get upside of it. How big is the firm? 

 

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