I’m going to attempt to “defend” my resume not because I’m upset about the criticism (I’m very thankful for it, actually!) but to show where I am coming from and hopefully, help me to better understand what to write and not to write.
Firstly, my background is in project management and consulting, with a heavy dose of financial analysis. It was a hell of an experience, dealing with big time corporate leadership and learning a lot from their wisdom and occasionally, their terrible behavior and decisions.
Secondly, this same work experience got considerable praise from recruiters from NYU and Columbia, with the NYU recruiter saying, and I quote “I’d accept you tomorrow if I could!” I don’t say that to brag or bost, but rather to show that I do have formidable experience in my field. Most of the jobs I have applied to (At blackrock, J.P. Morgan, GS, BofA, etc) have all been some flavor of project management, RE analysis or a junior analyst role, all where the descriptions say that minimal background (school or education) is required in financial analysis. I’m not going to pretend that I’m a shoe in for some bulge bracket I-bank or a senior VP position in Blackrocks fixed income research division. The reason I am undertaking the CFA program and looking at B-school is to acquire the skills I will need for what I ultimately want to do, but passing the CFA is a minimum of three years out, and B-school is longer still. Anyways, here goes my analysis: Skills:
While not having passed even L1 doesn’t mean a lot, it does demonstrate my interest in the industry and willingness (and desire) to pursue a rigorous education. MS office (including MS Project, etc is obvious - that’s a widely used tool). My portfolio, while not heavily invested in (5.5k of my own funds) has returned 12.1% over the past six months - again, I am passionate about this (and I’m doing a damn sight better than the majority of Hedge Funds! 
). Accomplishments:
I get results. Before I was legally allowed to drink (20 years old, I’m 25 now) I was working with my boss and our gaming partners corporate lawyers to design the land lease our firm held, including developing the compromise regarding performance bonuses (i.e. we got a % of revenues greater than $X per year) that was the source of a great deal of contention in our negotiations. While managing political outreach projects for a REIT and consulting for a gaming firm, I had the idea to arrange a partnership between them which would improve projected sales of the retail component while reducing the debt burden placed on a highly levered operator. I recognized a problem and developed a solution that benefited both companies while improving our take dramatically. Likewise, my self-taught financial analysis skills helped me to see the dangerousness of General Growth (though to be fair, 26.5 billion in high yield debt should scare anyone) in addition to seeing the downturn of the traditional mall, which they were proposing to build. This saved the company considerable money and headaches, as you can imagine.
Experience: I have a good deal of quantitative research under my belt, financial and otherwise. Meeting and working with so many state politicians (including the governor and speaker of the house) demonstrates my ability to interact with and persuade high ranking officials of the merits of our project. My skills at project management came in handy building and managing a project designed to choose the best developers for land we owned. Likewise, my quant abilities, interpersonal and project management skills helped me run our end of a project with a hedge fund.
Please disagree with me if you feel I am wrong.
Should I dive more into the steps in project management? To prevent my resume from becoming wordier than it already was, I assumed that a HR person would know that I used project management techniques and took the appropriate steps to manage what I was working on properly.
In any event, thank you all for the help thus far. It means a lot to me.
