Creeping sense of doom despite getting return offer?
Hi guys, not sure if anyone has experienced this, but i'm having a creeping sense of doom since getting and signing my return offer for a well known HF(MM, not SM unfortunately)
It was probably the best decision I could have taken, and I am really grateful to be starting my career on the public buyside, but for some reason my mind immediately started thinking about the downside, risk of getting fired etc. And this has continued for the past 3 months.
All of this feels like it should be normal(one should always be sober and watch out for risk factors once committing), but I cannot help but feel that this strange sense of distress is abnormal.
Has anyone felt something similar?
The HF industry is naturally very stressful, even compared to banking and other finance roles which are also extremely stressful. You shouldn't worry about getting fired in your first year, or honestly for your first couple years, but this is probably a worry that will linger. If it's truly overwhelming, perhaps consider a career change because stress wioll certainly intensify when you start full-time.
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I don't think you want to be carrying that much fear into your role. Fear will destroy your confidence completely and guarantee the outcome you are afraid of. It's like a Formula 1 racer who can't focus because he's afraid he'll have a fatal accident --- he'll end up having a fatal accident because he isn't focusing.
Fear, like all things, is a tool. Too much will destroy you, too little and you won't respect the challenge. You need to moderate your fear. How do you moderate fear? You do so by 1) identifying the outcome you're afraid of, 2) identifying the mistake you think you'll make, and 3) making adjustments based on 1) and 2). For instance, you may be afraid you will get fired because you doubt your modeling capabilities (2). To fix this, you'd do 100+ hours of modeling prep before you start (3). You'd let the excess fear serve as an energy to drive the effort. When you're finished, you'll have remarkable modeling capability, which will naturally reduce your underlying fear of making mistakes for this reason.
And, as for (1) above --- this is the trickier part. Identifying the outcome you are afraid of. For instance, if you're excessively afraid of what your friends, family, and network will think of you if you get fired, then perhaps you are getting in front of yourself by placing too much emphasis on their opinions in the first place. If this is the case, then you would need to try to reorient yourself to the people in your life, specifically you'd need to redefine what they (and their opinions) mean to you (easier said than done for those who aren't psychopaths/sociopaths --- I'm a complete sociopath, so I can edit details like this with relative ease).
In any case, I wish you the best of luck. Go and do battle with yourself. Conquer your mind. Get out of your head.
OP here. Thanks, this is remarkably helpful
What if your worry is more amorphous, like not being sure if you can deliver "alpha"?
Hi. Glad I could give you a boost. 2 responses to your question:
1) perhaps you are getting ahead of yourself? I have an IB/corp dev background, so I'm admittedly not aware of how MM hedge funds are structured. That being said, I can't imagine you will be responsible for 'delivering alpha' with your own P&L straight out of college. I imagine they will have you running the operating models and researching your PM's ideas? Think you need to focus more on (1) doing your role well as a junior at a hedge fund and (2) preparing yourself to absorb as much knowledge from your PM as possible (be a sponge). Don't worry about generating alpha as a new junior analyst, that's somewhere down the road. Take baby steps and focus on the challenges directly ahead. That's like an incoming IB analyst worrying about how he will generate fees - of course he's going to be terrified.
2) On your amorphous point --- if a thing doesn't have shape, then give it shape. All things can be broken down into objective pieces. Important point though--- you can't give a thing shape if you're so far removed from it that you don't even understand what it entails. In other words, perhaps 'delivering alpha' seems amorphous to you because you lack the career experience necessary to break it down objectively and form a plan accordingly. So, to my point above, don't get ahead of yourself. Be afraid that you're going to f*ck up a model in Week 3. Don't be afraid that you aren't David Sundheim yet.
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