The career I almost wrote off

The first time I heard about investment banking, I was sitting in english class in eighth grade. We had an assignment to write about our future and the careers we might want to pursue. I did what any bored eighth grader would do and Googled "top 10 most lucrative careers." Investment banking came in at number six, the money caught my eye, and I clicked.

My first impression was not flattering. It looked like a job for soulless corporate employees stuck in cubicles, grinding through Excel spreadsheets every day until their brains fell out of their ears. I figured it was exactly the kind of work I would never care about.

That night I told my grandfather Jidu about the assignment. He was a successful businessman, and he knew better than to let me judge anything off a single Google search. He told me to look past the first impression and actually learn what the field was.

So I did. The more I read, the less it looked like the cubicle job I had pictured. For one, it is deeply quantitative, and math is one of my favorite subjects, so the work itself pulled me in instead of boring me. It is also far more people-driven than I expected. There is real client interaction in it, and talking to people, reading a room, and negotiating are some of the things I am best at. Somewhere in there it stopped feeling like a random pick for a school assignment and started feeling like something I might actually want to do.

Then I found M&A (mergers and acquisitions), and that was the part that locked me in. I love the idea of two separate companies coming together to build one company that is bigger and more powerful than either one was on its own. Researching which companies actually make sense together, finding that opportunity before anyone else does, and presenting it, that is exactly the kind of work I am drawn to. From that point on, that is where I pointed my focus.

I want to be honest about where I am standing. I am not a banker, and I have never worked a single day in the field. Everything I think about it, I think from the outside looking in, so I am not going to pretend I know what it is really like.

It has been about three years since that day in algebra class, and the interest never faded. If anything it got more specific. What I do know is that the more I dig, the more the field holds up. I love the idea of advising big companies through the most important financial decisions they will ever make. The hours are notorious, and that does not scare me off the way it probably should, because relentless is already the word I would use for myself. I would rather grind for a hundred hours on something I actually care about than coast through something I do not. I have not been tested at that level yet, but everything I have thrown myself into so far tells me this is a fit. That is why I keep digging instead of moving on to something else.