The advice I wish I never got when Starting my Career
During my English classes in college, we are taught how to write a paper. A good paper has ethos, pathos, and logos, the Rhetoric of persuasion or something like that. Well as a 23 year old, barely out of college, I don’t have any ethos to be giving career advice. Maybe acknowledging that I don’t have any “real world” experience, I may be credited with enough personal brand, ethos, or whatever it is called these days to justify writing this blog post for you to read?
Others who have already figured out their career freely give out advice such as “Find a job that you love, and you won’t work a day in your life”. In my experience, it’s called work for a reason. You will be doing it for 10,400 days of your life, regardless of how much you enjoy it. I imagine there comes a point when you aren’t doing it because you love it anymore, and it is still work. Otherwise it would be called play. Although, I am weary of this statement, I get the point, and I can even begin to agree with it - find a job that you tolerate, and will enjoy most of the time. A different piece of career advice or business talk I can’t agree with at all: “Get a job in an industry you are passionate about”. I wish I didn’t believe this in college.
Unfortunately, I was told to “follow my passion” by many amazing people who I look up to. I’m pretty sure my own parent’s gave me this advice at one point.
I am a computer engineer by training, but I love finance. Like many people with hobbies, I would spend free time doing my hobby. For me, that was building computer programs to trade stocks. The entire finance system is a fascinating system to try and beat, and who doesn’t want to become rich? Throughout college I built a few financial trading systems trying to “beat the market”. Even my college senior project, was building a machine learning trading algorithm on an FPGA. Finance is something I love learning about and talking about (see blog post here and here)…. So naturally I pursued a job in the most finance-y of places.. a big bank on Wall Street in NYC.
I packed my bags left Utah and my husband for the summer to go to the big apple. Chasing a career I was passionate about. Way to go me!
After working through interviews and proving my dedication to finance, I got an internship.
Just for fun, check out this screenshot of my blog about me page before my summer Internship on Wall Street.
On the very first day compliance within the bank told me, and all the other engineers, to stop all personal trading algorithms. We had to get prior approval to execute trades (a process which took days, algorithmic trading makes split second stock decisions). I was told I couldn’t create any more algorithms. I was even told to close my Robinhood account, if possible. I couldn’t write any more beginner finance articles explaining what I was learning and building. I had to stop exploring and doing anything finance related outside of work, otherwise, I’d be “competing” with my work. In fact, I can’t code much at all outside of work without prior approval, without my new job owning what I write, even if it wasn’t finance related.This employment limitation also goes for the engineer who loves building games and gets a job at Blizzard or any other game studio. Or the fashion designer who designs her own clothing.
I get it, I’m not an idiot. I should have seen this coming. There are rules and laws against insider trading. Outside work could prevent you from doing your job correctly to benefit yourself instead of your clients. I also would also hate to hire someone who didn’t have the clients’ best interests at heart.
What I underestimated, was the entrepreneur drive within myself. I enjoy learning and building software and systems and sharing what I learn. I don’t know when, but eventually I do hope to start my own business, a small gig on the side, a more dedicated blog, or even a huge hedge fund. Who knows. I don’t want to limit this future business to exclude finance- to exclude anything.
No matter what industry you are in, if you are working for someone else, then you aren’t free to fully explore your passion. You are limited within the bounds of the job. The advice I wish I got as a college student was: Find a job that provides learning and networking opportunities to supplement your real passion, and keep doing what you are passionate about on the side. The opportunity cost isn’t worth it.
I am not one to break any rules, so I did the only thing I could do. I left banking. It might be a very dumb decision, but I guess we will see!
-JoCee