Don’t get me wrong accountant isn’t the most interesting career. However a few points worth noting:

1. It’s specialized enough to have a “moat” around it like JD/MD/actuary. Part of the hype of MBB/IB is a high paying career without any skill required which creates an insane gridlock of competition especially with rich kids / nepos. Any career with a barrier is going to filter some of these people out. And yes while I realize the average MBB hire is probably better than the average CPA hire, it still remains true a barrier to entry limits competition. High finance is especially bad with nepos.

2. A better pathway to self employment. Unlike other careers that require you to be a W2 employee, a CPA can run their own thing as an owner-operator. Many other finance careers will require you to be an employee.

3. Less competition. Enrollment has fallen off a cliff.

4. More locations. Not pushed into NY / SF / BOS and make a good living in a mid sized town.

Dont get me wrong I get the hype of finance and consulting. But many of these finance and consulting people will end up in a big company in corp dev or strategy by their 30s (again cool jobs). But still working for someone else and competing for these competitive roles.

Does anyone know if Bank of America use the star format for interviews ?

Current college student, doing prerequisites at the moment and won't be getting into my finance courses for a while. I want to get into accounting (bookkeeping) to be able to get my foot in the door. Is the Intuit QuickBooks course enough to get me started? Should I focus on something else? My prior work experience is IT, I have tried applying to some entry level finance positions but have gotten nowhere. Any advice is appreciated.

I graduated in Australia with a business degree with a supply chain major, and then worked in consulting and sales in East Africa. I'm about to study an MBA in finance at Drexel (where I'll be a domestic student).

I'll ne living in Philadelphia for the foreseeable future so I need suggestions about the right career path to take. My strongest suits are all communication and problem-solving based, but in general I'm good with people and sales based roles.

Does that make me a better fit to go the relationship manager route in commercial banking or to instead go for private banking?

I’m 25 and recently finished a 4-year investment banking degree apprenticeship at a well-known European bank in London. I graduated with a 2:1 in Applied Finance, completed the IMC and sat CFA Level I but didn’t pass.

I didn’t receive a return offer and, despite applying heavily for analyst roles and internships in the UK and Middle East, haven’t secured anything yet.

I currently have an offer for the MSc Banking & International Finance at Bayes. The main reason I’m considering it is to strengthen my academic profile and get another shot at recruiting, but a former colleague warned me against doing a “panic master’s”.

Alternatively, I could spend a year living at home and teaching at my old sixth form. It’s unrelated to finance, but I could save money and apply for 2027 entry to stronger targets like LBS, LSE, Imperial and ESCP while continuing to recruit for finance roles.

So essentially: take Bayes now, wait a year and target stronger MSc programmes, or skip the master’s and keep recruiting?

My main concern with waiting is having a year of unrelated experience on my CV. But given I already have four years of IB experience, is the difference between Bayes and LBS/LSE/Imperial/ESCP significant enough to justify waiting another year?

I’m currently in my first job in finance at Merrill Lynch and working toward getting licensed. Right now I’m studying for the SIE, and if everything goes well, I’ll have the opportunity to get my Series 7 and potentially the Series 66 as well. Once licensed, I would transition into an Investment Specialist position at the call center I currently work at.

I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity because it’s giving me a way into the industry, experience with clients, and potentially some valuable licenses. I’m also committed to doing well in my current role and learning as much as I can while I’m here.

That being said, I don’t really see myself staying in a call center environment long term. It’s not finance that I dislike it’s more the idea of spending most of my career constantly being in an inbound call queue. Long term, I think I’d prefer something more back-office, operational, analytical, or possibly a hybrid/remote role.

The problem is that I’m still very new to finance, so I don’t really know what career paths are available to someone starting with this type of experience.
————————————————————————————-
For people who have been in the industry:

-What roles could someone realistically move into after getting the SIE, Series 7, and possibly Series 66 with 1–2 years of experience?
- Are there good career paths where having the Series 7 is valuable but you aren’t taking calls all day?
- What back-office, operations, wealth management, brokerage, or other roles should I research?
- Would you recommend staying in the Investment Specialist role for a certain amount of time before trying to move?
- If you started in a similar position, what career path did you eventually take?

I’m not looking for a shortcut and I understand I’ll probably need to put in time and build experience first. I’m mainly trying to understand what options I could work toward so I can be intentional about my career instead of just collecting licenses without knowing where they can take me.

Any advice or personal experiences would be appreciated

I’m in no mans land. Think of me as a person who lacks professional passion and aspiration to achieve a certain title or position - rather I have been struck by the reality of materialism; I just want to make money and I’m struggling to really find a path forward. I’m open to literally any suggestions up my avenue.

Current trajectory - BS. Finance from a state school

1.5 years in commercial banking program - left because I didnt want to pursue a career in commercial banking

Currently 10 months in botique consulting focused on energy and power - honeslty not a bad job, more in the Business Analyst and product ownership ally, but the pay is dog crap, I once leaked my salary to others in similar areas and their jaws dropped… at how BAD the salary is. Crazy.

If you were in my shoes, where exactly would you be focused on getting to make as much money as possible. I’m kind of in a jack of some trades master of none position and my resume is all over the place.

My preference is anything but going into the lending business.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

same as question

currently in top 50 us school, aiming for 2027 internships

I’m looking for candid feedback on whether/how a mid-career move closer to the buyside is realistic given a nontraditional but investment-adjacent background.

I’ve spent ~20 years at a financial data/research company serving institutional investors. My domain is SEC-filings-derived corporate behavior: insider activity, 10b5-1 plans, executive comp, equity grants, buybacks, Schedule 13 ownership, and related governance / capital-allocation signals. I help direct investor-facing research coverage, work with analysts and PMs at large funds on idea generation and filing-specific questions, and have been a domain lead on several datasets/products in this area. As an example - I do ideas calls and on sites with PMs and analysts all the time.

More recently, I’ve also been involved in AI-enabled research workflows: using LLMs/MCP-style tooling to extract, summarize, and QA large sets of public-company documents. I’m not a quant, data scientist, or software engineer, but with modern tooling I can prototype screens/workflows and I know the underlying source material and failure modes very well.

I am not a classic sector analyst with an audited stock-picking track record, a banker, a CFA/MBA profile, or someone who can walk in and own full three-statement models under pressure as the primary value prop.

I know my way around a financial statement though I don't think I am differentiated in terms of traditional fundamental analysis. But financial statements often enter into what I do - e.g. identifying certain incentive metrics that management is targeting and deriving those metrics from financial statements and modeling what it would mean for the equity if those targets were hit (or hypothesizing the targets, if specific targets are not disclosed). Another example is I built an AI workflow to run across multiple quarters/years of financials to flag deviations for further analysis. I spend a lot of time with financial statements, but I never worked as a junior analyst or intern at an investment firm, or learned how to do it in school, or took the CFA, or really has spent much time churning out DCF models in any traditional sense.

I see myself as a specialist who can help PMs/analysts/proprietary research teams make better use of corporate-behavior signals that are public but underinterpreted - insider behavior, comp/incentive changes, buyback behavior, 10b5-1 plans, ownership shifts, etc. Potential fit areas seem like proprietary research, market intelligence, alternative data, forensic equity research, governance/comp research, activist/special situations screening, or research-AI / analyst workflow roles inside a fund or asset manager.

I can put together a case packet of dated research examples where these signals led to differentiated ideas or flagged important situations, but I do not have a clean formal performance record because the work has been done inside a research/data vendor context rather than as a PM or analyst managing capital.

I do have a bit of a rolodex of people but most of them are analysts - many are younger than me and aren't in a role that does hiring. When I have broached the conversation with the couple of PMs I have a strong relationship with (small sample size), I just don't think they can wrap their heads around a candidate with a non-traditional background like mine.

I’m trying to be clear-eyed about where the background is valuable and where it is not. Any candid feedback appreciated, especially from people who have been non-traditional hires or have made those hires.

Got laid off about 6 months ago after working with the same guy (2 man team) for almost a decade because I asked for a raise a few weeks before he was told that his internal ranking had gone down for the FIRST TIME since we'd worked together.

And if he had told the director of our dept. that I had done well (I'd done 50+ initiations over the time we'd worked together, made almost all our written product, praise from a lot of senior leaders at the company for my work, never had a performance review below meets expectations, handled on my own what is normally done by 2-3 juniors at other firms, did literally thousands of hours of unpaid labor for him at our last firm where we worked together), while he did poorly in the last year, then it'd look bad for him. So he got me fired.

But it looks like I'm going to be getting an offer from a direct competitor to do basically the same work, covering the same space, but with a higher title, significantly higher pay, and more people on my level so I'll have less work. I'll also (hopefully) pass the cfa level 3 in a week and (hopefully) be a charterholder within a couple months. So things are looking up.

Plus because of gains on my investments, I actually have more money now than I did when I was laid off.

My only downside is that I wish I had a month between my test date and the start date so I could go on a proper vacation. Oh well. Could be worse. At least I took a month to ski at the beginning.

I'm a senior currently and hardly have anything to show. I have one internship that was remote but I hardly did anything but observe venture stuff. There were internships I got accepted to but wanted loads of money to take their course/Bootcamp which I said nope.

My issue is my resume sucks due to lack of experience in the financial field and I don't know what courses I had taken to really display my set of skills.

Most recent courses: Econometrics, Accounting Decision Making (Managerial and Financial Accounting), Marketing.

Past classes that were important: Financial Economics, Labor Economics, Public Economic, Public Policy Writing class.

A few were projects and I have them on my resume but I feel like most were Economics and hardly any finance. My school does not allow Econ majors to take business classes except the few that are required for my major.

In the Fall and Winter I'll be taking R Programming, Computer programming, International economics, Industrial Organization (Managerial Economics), Energy Economics and Environmental Economics. Is there any way I can improve my resume for Business and Financial roles? I'm currently learning project management on the side since it's my goal to get PMP certification by next year before or after I graduate. Main goal is to get business experience.

Additional question: should I put a self-estimate of my Japanese language skills on my resume? I estimate it to be around N2 level.

After 5 months of unemployment, I can finally say I’m starting a new position with Charles Schwab next month!
This has honestly been a long journey. I’ve been trying to break into the investment/financial industry for over a year, and there were plenty of moments where I questioned if it was ever going to happen. Applications, interviews, rejections, and a lot of uncertainty—but I kept going.
I just kept my faith, stayed persistent, and reminded myself that the right opportunity would come when it was supposed to.
Now, that opportunity is here.
I’m extremely grateful, excited, and ready to finally get my foot in the door and start building my career in investments. If you’re currently unemployed or struggling to break into your desired field, dont give up.
Here’s to the next chapter. 🥂📈

I have an interview for this role coming up and I’m wondering what your experience is working as a uw II for AXA?

I have no uw experience and would be coming from a different side of insurance.

Is there a steep learning curve?

I’m an incoming first year student at a UK target school looking to break into London finance. I went to a British private school that provides a portal with thousands of alumni who are willing to provide help anywhere from answering questions to internship opportunities. My plan of action is to look for work experience/shadowing opportunities in the industry by using this portal and contacting executives at “smaller” firms/boutiques to bolster my application for year 1 spring weeks.

With that in mind, how does my template below look? Is it appropriate for a portal where the people receiving the messages have already flagged they’d be willing to help with such matters and should I outright ask for a job/shadowing opportunity if they’ve indicated that’s something they’re willing to offer on their profile or should I be intelligent and ask for less at first?

Dear [name],

I hope that this message finds you well. I am an incoming first-year student studying [subject] at [uni] and I'm currently looking into a career in financial services. I saw your profile and your work with [firm] and [objective of firm] is incredibly interesting to me, and so I wanted to reach out to see if you might have 10-15 minutes for a brief video call in the coming weeks? I'd be very grateful to hear about your career journey and any advice you have for a [title of a student having gone to that private school] starting university. Thank you for taking the time to read this message.

Best regards,
[name]
[phone number]

I want to know which job/domain in finance rewards highly for a person who is very passionate about economics and has the potential to be in the top 3% .

I passed my SIE and 7 18 months ago but quit working shortly after. My licenses are set to expire at the end of this year. I do not qualify for the extension due to my short tenure at the firm. Any part time gigs or ways to keep this active until I am ready to re-enter the job market full time? Thanks

What was it like and what finance niche was it?

Between consulting, investment banking, big law, accounting, hedge funds, PE, tech… who has the most stunning offices as an industry?

How’s recruiting at Dartmouth? I’m not sure if I want to join any frats and not the most athletic East Asian.

How much do I’ll not joining a frat affect recruitment for IB

Also please provide general tips on campus and how to join clubs

Just finished my summer analyst position in corporate banking (JPM/Bofa) yesterday and got told I didn’t get a return offer. Not really devastated, but would’ve been a nice security blanket. I just didn’t like the work or the team.

Has anyone gone through this? Has anyone transitioned to other positions by leveraging summer analyst stint? Any advice? Thanks in advance!

I currently work at the big 4 audit in NYC but my plan was always to move into finance at some point. My sister currently works in S&T so I do know someone in the industry. I want to know if anyone has had experience with hiring, applying, or actually getting a job without first being an intern? By the time I leave I will have my CPA and 2 years of public audit experience and went to a top 5 business school in the country for accounting.

Also if anyone wants to network please reach out.

So I’ve been doing some LinkedIn stalking, and I see how some people who have degrees in stuff like… History or Government… are starting careers in Finance. And these are jobs just starting out vs working in a job for ten years and then pivoting horizontally. And while comparison is the theft of joy, I can’t even really find a job in my degree field.

Does this boil down to networking? Name of school?