The email below (or collection of emails) came from an international student wih a Technology background who is currently enrolled at a US business school. He arrived at B-school targeting Consulting as his career path, but has since become interested in Finance. He’s having a tough time deciding which path to take with his career, so he’s looking for my advice on the issue. His original email came to me over the summer, but he made the mistake of sending me a follow-up email to rush a response from me. Y’all know how I am when it comes tot aht sort of thing, so I let his email sit in the background for a while. I figured that now is as good a time as any to get to his question because it’s a pretty good one.
—– First message –>
AD wrote:
“HI Marquis,
I am a regular reader of your blog. The blog has such a wealth of information. Thank you for taking time of your schedule and helping us people.
I am a MBAI student from a top 10 B school in the US and trying to decide where to focus my energy related to career search. My background is from Engineering and I too worked in IT before coming to B school. Since, I didn’t know anything about Finance then, I never thought a career in related fields and consulting was my first career choice.
However, now that I am in the school, I am finding Finance equally attractive especially the valuation and equity research part. That said, I am still very much interested in the problem solving aspect of consulting and thus finding it difficult to chose one over the other.
I am sure you may have gone through this thought process in your B school days and Finance must have appealed to the analytical side of your brain. Why then, you decided not to pursue a career in this field?
Your input will really be helpful. Keep doing what you have been. We all are obliged.”
Second message –>
AD wrote:
“Hey Marquis,
Just wondering if you received my earlier email since I didn’t see anything on your blog for a while. I know you are busy and I am not trying to push you, but just wanted your perspective.
AD”
Third message –>
AD wrote:
“Marquis,
Apologies. It wasn’t my intention to push you or pressurize you. I just wanted to check if you got my email. Since, I didn’t hear anything for 3+ weeks, I didn’t know if my email made to your inbox or not. Please take your time in answering.
Thank you, AD”
—– My response to his second message: You guys know how I hate people trying to rush me for responses, right? Well, this guy’s email came in before I posted the guidelines for contacting me back in November, so I kinda had to go in on him…
“If you’re a regular reader of my blog, then there are a few things that you should already know about how I run things on it:
1. It often takes me a long time to respond to people because of the sheer volume of emails that I get. There have even been times when it’s taken me over eight months to respond to people. In fact, I have emails in my Inbox right now that were sent to me in April 2009.
2. I work by my own timeline when it comes to this sort of thing because I’m doing this out of my own time as a way of helping people. I don’t work by other people’s timelines.
3. I HATE when people send me emails asking if I’ve seen their message because I haven’t responded to them in some timing that seems suitable to them. With the effort that it takes to do what i do for folks, it truly bothers me when people can’t even show me the simple courtesy of being patient. Aside from angering me, these type of follow-up messages push the original email further down in my Inbox queue, which means it’ll take longer for me to get to it. Even wilder, I made a post less than a month ago describing my distaste for these sort of follow-up emails, but I guess people aren’t paying attention.
I used to always say that I’ll always respond to people’s emails, but I’ve decided to pick and choose the ones that I address because it seems that people don’t take the time to think of what it must be like from my end to be doing this. Don’t take this the wrong way, but, whenever I get to your original email in my queue, it’ll be difficult for me not to think about this follow-up message that you’ve sent me…
Marquis”
My response to his third message: Now that I’m going through my Inbox, I realize that the guy was asking a pretty good question, so I decided to write a response to him. You know…posting those contact guidelines has done wonders for keeping people from sending me emails trying to rush their messages to the front of my queue.
“AD,
I hope this message finds you doing well and enjoying the holidays with your loved ones. I bet it must be great to get some time off after closing out your academic semester. I know it’s been a while since you first emailed me, but I’m just now getting a chance to go through my Inbox and get to my messages from September.
Your description of how you began to enjoy Finance after being set on Consulting when you first got to business school resonated with me because I had a similar experience in my own MBA journey. I went into business school knowing that I wanted to go into Management Consulting and never thought I’d have the slightest interest in Finance. That belief continued as I went through the MBA1 core curriculum and found the core Finance course to be incredibly challenging and not fun at all. That all changed during my second year when I took the elective Corporate Finance course taught by Prof. George Parker, who was my favorite professor during my time at the GSB. Instead of being confusing and foreign like it was during the core class, Finance became easy to understand, incredibly interesting, and something that I was actually good at while I was in Prof. Parker’s class. Kids in my GSB class LOVED Prof. Parker and that devotion was rewarded when he won the Distinguished Teaching award in my second year. Despite my strong interest in the topic, I never really considered pursuing a Finance career during my second year because I had my mind set on getting an offer from McKinsey, which happened by the end of the first quarter of that year.
Over the past few years, my interest in Finance has grown and I see it playing a major role in my career now and in the future, but I’m glad that I started off my post-MBA career in Consulting. As I think about my longer-term career, I know that it’ll take me to an organizational leadership role where I’ll need a higher-level strategic point of view. Building a foundation of problem solving, strategy, and people leadership skills felt like the right starting point for me because I was basically a blank slate as I exited business school. Now, I’m at the point where I’m ready to build upon that baseline of foundational skills with experiences more focused on functional skills that I’ll need to actually run a company or organization (operations, resource management, accounting, etc.), with Finance being one of the most important because the need to understand financial value levers. Acquiring these skills in this order make sense to me in terms of my own path, but others may think about it in a completely different way. I’m not saying that starting off with a Finance focus is a non-preferred way to guide one’s career, but, given my starting point, it wouldn’t have been the best path for me. I don’t know how what I’ve said will play into your own thinking on the choice you’re facing, but I figured that I’d explain it on the off chance that it would be helpful.
Whether you go with Consulting or Finance as your career path after business school, I have a feeling that you’ll find that your Finance-related courses will be, not only interesting as a student, but also incredibly useful in the Real World. Take care and good luck on the rest of your school year.
Marquis”
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