The way to get into finance is to go to a top college and major in either business, economics a hard science or engineering discipline. There are people who take other paths, but that’s the main way to go. Financial firms are typically not overly concerned about specific college majors. I personally did Physics + Econ, but Comp Sci + Econ would have worked just as well. The point is that you can pick a major that is valuable outside of finance and still pursue a job in finance. That way, if finance doesn’t work out you will still be fine.
You don’t generally go to business school straight out of college. Typically, you work for a few years first. So, the “sunk cost” of a finance career is only the cost of college. That compares favorably with being a doctor or lawyer, and is similar to becoming a software developer or something like that.
If you can get an elite finance job (like analyst at Goldman) straight out of college, it will look good on your resume no matter what you do afterwords. If you can’t get an elite finance job, but can get some sort of finance job, things change a bit because different areas of finance have different levels of transferability of skills. If you go into a particular niche and then wash out of it or just want to do something else, you might find that your experience is not that valuable.
My particular niche in finance (trading) has fairly crappy transferability of skills. What I do does not teach a lot of general “business” or management skills. There are 2 ways to deal with this issue. One is to only go into trading if you are very confident that it is your true calling. That way, being able to do something else is a moot point. The other is to start out as a quant or programmer. Learning how to program and how to do data analysis are very valuable skills in lots of fields. Finance is one of the best paying fields for programmers and working as a programmer will allow you see how trading works. A lot of traders worked as programmers first. Here is an article about it that features a friend of mine.
I am not a huge fan of “earning to give” and I’m not sure that finance is the best place to engage in that activity anyway.If you want to save lives you could become a doctor and save lives all day and still make enough money to donate to saving more lives. Most people who succeed in finance are intensely interested in money. We have to spend all day thinking about minute details related to making money. Most of the spouses of my colleagues (including my own) have almost no understanding of what we do. They just find it too boring to think about. Having a career that you find boring is a good way to be a miserable person and mediocre at what you do.
I have a few thoughts on this:
The way to get into finance is to go to a top college and major in either business, economics a hard science or engineering discipline. There are people who take other paths, but that’s the main way to go. Financial firms are typically not overly concerned about specific college majors. I personally did Physics + Econ, but Comp Sci + Econ would have worked just as well. The point is that you can pick a major that is valuable outside of finance and still pursue a job in finance. That way, if finance doesn’t work out you will still be fine.
You don’t generally go to business school straight out of college. Typically, you work for a few years first. So, the “sunk cost” of a finance career is only the cost of college. That compares favorably with being a doctor or lawyer, and is similar to becoming a software developer or something like that.
If you can get an elite finance job (like analyst at Goldman) straight out of college, it will look good on your resume no matter what you do afterwords. If you can’t get an elite finance job, but can get some sort of finance job, things change a bit because different areas of finance have different levels of transferability of skills. If you go into a particular niche and then wash out of it or just want to do something else, you might find that your experience is not that valuable.
My particular niche in finance (trading) has fairly crappy transferability of skills. What I do does not teach a lot of general “business” or management skills. There are 2 ways to deal with this issue. One is to only go into trading if you are very confident that it is your true calling. That way, being able to do something else is a moot point. The other is to start out as a quant or programmer. Learning how to program and how to do data analysis are very valuable skills in lots of fields. Finance is one of the best paying fields for programmers and working as a programmer will allow you see how trading works. A lot of traders worked as programmers first. Here is an article about it that features a friend of mine.
I am not a huge fan of “earning to give” and I’m not sure that finance is the best place to engage in that activity anyway.If you want to save lives you could become a doctor and save lives all day and still make enough money to donate to saving more lives. Most people who succeed in finance are intensely interested in money. We have to spend all day thinking about minute details related to making money. Most of the spouses of my colleagues (including my own) have almost no understanding of what we do. They just find it too boring to think about. Having a career that you find boring is a good way to be a miserable person and mediocre at what you do.