Advice for someone in my situation

Water Cooler
#21

Everyone knows the entry ticket to a high paying job in finance is to be good looking, waspy/Jewish, with family friends already in the business. Oh and aside from that good grades from a decent school. But odds are if you are good looking, Jewish/waspy, and have family friends in the business you will already have that stuff.

For everyone else, good luck. Cfa might help. But I wouldn’t count on it.

OPs best chance is to find an expat manager who wants to hire another white guy for his team but pay him like a yellow guy to start.

#22

and think about the nobel prizes and the distribution of winners skewed to the shalom.

#23

do people actually fully read those novels? no offense

And secondly, answers are repeated because slight variations of the same questions keep being asked. Why would the answers vary? How many times have people asked ex: “L1 vs L2?” “is schweser enough?” etc Why don’t you complain when I give the same answer to those questions? come on man.

When I see a thread like this, I think to myself when bchad is going come in and say ‘yes you can’ regardless of how the situation is. “Hi, I have basically no finance experience, and went off a non-finance path for a while, but I have genuine interest, can I make it?” bchad: “Yes you have hope.”

I find it very ironic sometimes, you’ve spoken about freedom of opinions and not hampering them on AF because it provides multi perspectives on various topics. And now you’re writing in a thread about how other people’s opinions are “always too cynical” and insinuating that it should be avoided or written off.

If I said something very wrong, or factually incorrect, by all means, bring it up. I told OP things are tough, and to not hang hopes on it landing a job. What’s cynical or wrong about that?

As a boardmember, I wouldn’t expect this from you man.

#24

heh, seems I’ve caused quite a stir at the Water Cooler. First off, I appreciate all of your feedback, encouraging or not. Like I said, at this point I’m more or less just a guy examining different options and open to most any idea.

Chad, thank you for your very insightful posts. I appreciate you taking the time. Your point about this being useful knowledge regardless of whether or not I end up in finance is a lot of my thinking. I have a lot of time to learn something new this year, so I want to take advantage of that.

MCalamari - As for my Chinese, I’m nowhere near the level to where I speak as well as a Chinese person. That’s a level that would take a decade or more to achieve, and I’d still have an accent. I want to improve my Chinese more over time by continuing to live here. At this point I’m good enough to comfortably get through the day and have fairly detailed conversations. As for my undergrad, I went to a middle range university and studied MIS and operations management. I have some techincal skills from that, but, of course, no real quality experience. In the states I worked at a lawfirm for 2 years, where I used their computer systems to manage case and client information, which was even less technical than it sounds.

Ohai - thanks for the post. The MBA is something I want to do as well. I honestly feel like I wouldn’t enjoy it very much right now though, as I’ve never really worked in business and have no point of reference for most of the things I’d be studying. Part of the reason I thought about trying to pass level one while I’m here in China is it would show that I managed my time well while I was here and might help my application a little if I do go the MBA route in the future. I could very well be wrong about that though.

Chicken - I’m more than willing to work for a local Chinese salary to get experience. Hell, I’d even do an unpaid internship at this point if I was getting something valuable out of it. I have enough savings from my last job to last me for a while while I’m in China.

Iteracom, I don’t mind you being blunt with me. Thanks for giving your opinion.

Chad mentioned something that I should emphasize, and that’s that I really don’t see myself becoming the big swinging dick in the company. Climbing the ladder is nice, but it’s not everything to me, and I really didn’t mean to imply that I can sidestep the competition somehow by getting the CFA. The fact is this kind of work is interesting to me, and as long as that’s the case I don’t really need to be the top dog whereever I end up.

Right now I’m kind of split about what to do. You guys have been great about giving me a variety of perspectives. Thanks.