Torn Between Career Paths, Long Thread But PLEASE Help!
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01 Aug 2011, 01:32
Hi,
I am about to be a senior in college and I am still very confused about what I want to do with my life. Currently, I attend a state school and am majoring in finance with a minor in econ, but I've started to realize that the nitty-gritty finance isn't really for me. I've done a little bit of work in FP&A and the job seemed mostly like accounting that focuses on lots of details, which I don't normally like. At least at the place I worked at, I found the job to be way too retrospective and not enough about strategy/where to go from here, if you catch my drift. Plus, I kind of want more interaction with people/presenting as opposed to sitting in a cubicle cranking out financials. I also had some exposure to DCF, but it seriously was not that interesting and I thought it was a bunch of BS assumptions that added no real value to the company. Additionally, I have no interest in stocks/hedge funds and only got a degree in finance because I wanted the i-banking => PE career path, but I'm not sure I'm into that anymore.
I started to look into other careers and immediately management consulting struck me as the best option. However, coming from a non-target and a non-spectacular background, it will be next to impossible to break into MBB right out of undergrad. As a result, I started to explore other options and got interested in brand management. It seems like a more quantitative area of marketing (even though I don't have a huge patience for accounting details, I do really enjoy working with numbers and statistics especially to create forecasts/analyze data) and it doesn't seem as demanding in terms of hours/stress as consulting or banking. The problem here is that I have neither a marketing nor an engineering degree, so I was wondering if this is even possible to get into for me (same dilemma as management consulting).
Therefore, at this point, I'm really confused as to what I want/should do for my career. I don't think that vanilla finance at a F500 is interesting enough for me as it seems very retrospective/mechanical/repetitive work, and I don't have the background for consulting/brand management. Can anyone recommend some career paths I should possibly look into (in case it helps, my MBTI is INTJ which slight flexibility with N/S)? Could corporate banking (another thing, I know I CANNOT work in i-banking since it's way too many hours/stress. Don't care too much for money as long as I break mid to high 6 figs in the 100-200k range eventually, but can't stand hours/unpredictable schedules) be something to look into or is there any other area in corp finance that I am missing? I'm just so lost and stressed right now that any advice would be brilliant.
Cheers and let me know if I need to add more info about me!