Is 35y to old to start?

I love the tenacity and willingness to give it a go. I think things will be very difficult to break in through the traditional route given your age.

My best advice would be to leverage your skills in chemical and pharmaceutical industry to attempt and break into a HF that specializes in those areas (though, to be honest, is highly unlikely).

I know that this sounds very harsh, but you're showing up to the race very late, and quite frankly without even a decent pair of sneakers to run with. Best of luck to you!

I'm a prospect. Since you're new to this forum, I'll explain what this means really quickly. Basically, any advice I can give is speculative at best and you should be careful about listening to my advice (or that of any prospect).

You're 30. On average, you have somewhere between another 30 to 50 years on this planet. What you do with it is your choice. You can pursue the easy option and continue to work in your industry for the rest of your life and then retire nicely. Perfectly fine path. But you'll always be nagged by that question of what if. What if I just went for it? What would my life be like now? You're in a unique position where you can pursue something and still have a fallback plan. You can dive headfirst into your pursuit and still be able to know that you and your family won't go hungry because of your dreams.

Go for it. I say go for it, 100%. Life is too short to pick the simple route every time. Sure, you're not a traditional candidate for much, but who cares? Give it you're all and if you fail, you fail. If you succeed, I don't need to tell you how much that would mean to you. It'll be hard, but if you put in everything, you got this! Good luck!

Instead of IBD, a cool thing that would allow you to leverage your experiences would be market research. If you are focused on IBD, you could focus on a healthcare focused boutique shop/group like Cain Brothers/healthcare at Stifel.

Hello fellow chemist. I will offer my take on this as well.

I spend years getting trained in chemistry first my bachelors and later PhD. But tbh I didn’t really enjoy my work post grad school. I was in a similar position as you. I couldn’t imagine spending my career in the Lab. So decided to make the switch at 32. I went back to school to get my MBA full time. And I never wanted to go into banking but at school, but consulting and finance roles in Pharma were absolute game.

If you do get an MBA, consider specializing in finance. As you apply to business schools consider clearing CFA level 1. I will bet that you will get plenty of interest from Pharma companies in their finance function. I will agree that going into banking even with an MBA will be very hard. But you could give it a shot once you get to a good program.

All being said, tell a good story in your applications and try getting into top 10 or worst top 15 programs. Get a high GMAT and maintain high GPA in college.

set up some phone calls with bankers to gauge ur interest and they will steer you in the right direction.