Coming in from the cold: can I segway in from an interesting, but irrelevant, career?

You're some good fellas with admirable ambitions and a wealth of experience - I want your advice for some longer term strategic career planning, if you think you've got any gems to give.

I have no high-powered business background. None of my experience shouts, or even mutters, "high finance." That all said, I think that Wall Street, and the institutions in and adjacent to it, provide opportunities for motivated people to become well-compensated for doing very interesting work. I've had only the barest brushes with trading, but it's thrilling, it's addictive, and I'd love to learn to do it all professionally.

Let me demonstrate exactly how non-finance things have been for me so far.

Bluntly, my profile: I am in my early twenties from a school with a very good international relations program. I graduated a little over a year ago. My studies were in IA, international security, and intensive Mandarin Chinese.

During college, I had amazing fun. Through sheer luck and the vaguest dregs of charisma, I stacked a number of different internships doing comparatively high-impact things. I did think tank research, a semester with a government department teaching domestic/foreign military officers at the O-6 and above levels, and a final internship stint doing work in data-based counterespionage. I worked with some very cool people, met incredible mentors, and briefed individuals way, way, way above my paygrade. During those four years I also worked as a volunteer with a security non-profit teaching field tradecraft, intelligence research and analysis, and elicitation (think strategic rapport-building, with a little bit of deviousness) to private individuals. At the same time, I also worked for a year as a contract-based consultant for the government with a start-up.

On graduation, I went off the rails and moved into a position as a programs director for a very large, but relatively obscure, non-profit organization focused on domestic charitable work - so not at all what I was doing, but the mission's been great, I manage a personal program staff of 8 - 10 part and full-time individuals, and the job is never boring.

Now we're at the present. This is where the planning comes in.

It's been a hell of a fun run of it, but in about a year (thus giving me a round two years of experience at the charity I'm with) I'll be putting in a packet for military service with the objective of becoming an officer. That'll keep me for a few years and I'll get out late-20s. By the time I'm out, I've been thinking that I'd like to put in for an MBA program and then, more importantly, I'd like to do something with it.

Justifiably, and I think correctly, I don't just feel a few steps down competitively - I feel like I have an entire mountain to climb. But if there's a route to where I want to be, I think I have the grit and motivation to take the steps I need to. But before all that, can a late-in-the-game career be made out of banking institutions with a background like this? Is there anywhere in Wall Street where I can sneak in the back door with 1) a background this non-traditional and 2) that late in the game age-wise?

 

Yeah if you become an officer in the military and then go to a top 10 MBA program, you'll have some good options.

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 

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