The basic premise has been to give the math major frank advice about the worth of this degree and how best to use it in forging a productive and enjoyable career. One way you can ensure that without exercising the option of graduate school is by focusing on the development and acquisition of "portable" skills; that is, skills that you can carry from job to job. Content skills are pertinent to one job and not easily transferable to another. For example, if you work in the investment department of a bank and monitor the bank's portfolio of investments, you acquire two kinds of knowledge in this job. The first, your content knowledge, is what you learn about those specific stocks and their performance. Unless you encounter those stocks, again in another job (not likely), the information doesn't "carry over" to new employment. Portable skills, however, follow you throughout your career. The portable skills you learned in portfolio management would be your data analysis, your work with relational databases, your knowledge of the market and trends in general. In today and tomorrow's ever changing job market, portable skills offer you the best measure of job security.
But if, for the reasons listed above or perhaps some other reasons, this path to a graduate degree isn't for you, you can still accomplish the same goals in a slightly different way. Seek out positions after graduation that provides the same kind of preparation as these analyst jobs can give you, but without some of the "thorns." For example, you can find these positions without relocating to an urban area. You can locate analyst positions in firms with less turn over and less competition for these lower level entry jobs. You certainly can locate firms that will value your talents at that job and not be eager for you to leave. Let's look at some recent job announcements for positions that would be ideal for you:
These are, of course, career positions and not the fast track kinds of positions described in the career path. These jobs certainly do not rule out the possibility of your advancing your education at some point in the future. You may decide to go to graduate school at night and hold on to your position. In fact, the employer may offer you educational benefits as an inducement to that course of action. And, of course, you may decide your job is so interesting with so many possibilities for personal enrichment that you decide not to go to graduate school, at least for the foreseeable future. Whatever your decision, you will have begun to build upon your undergraduate education with valuable work experience that benefits both your career and any possibility of future professional education.
Working Condition
Abreast of Current Affairs the work is time consuming, there is no question of that. This is due to the fact that analysts read so much. The best analysts read constantly-newspapers (more than one a day), annual reports, trade publications, journals, biographies, even novels-whatever keeps them abreast of the developments and changes in the marketplace. As a math major, this may come as a surprise, a delight, or a concern. So much of your work in your major involved processing and problem solving and not a significant amount of prose reading. And college life often leaves busy undergraduates little time to stay abreast of current affairs. If you are a reader and enjoy staying current, then you'll be delighted to find a career path that marries that interest with your degree. It will be a concern if you're not only out of practice reading, but not a particularly avid reader when you do have time.
Find the Concentration of Employers Whether you are working for a consulting firm of the size that can afford a number of research or financial associate positions, or an investment bank or the investment department of a commercial bank large enough to have such a department, you should be thinking in terms of a major metropolitan area or the highway belt around such an area. This is where you will find the concentration of employers hosting these kinds of positions. To generalize a bit further, one could say these positions are concentrated in Boston, Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco. The major brokerage houses have branch offices in over eight hundred cities across the United States.
Explore Living in the Metropolitan Area as career counselors, we have discovered there are a variety of reactions to living in a metropolitan area-some people love the idea and others don't. Most will admit, however, that metropolitan living offers more choices than any other locale: more choices in living, more choices about shopping, more choices in entertainment, and many more opportunities to meet people. When our own alumni who work in the city return to campus to visit, they tell us that living in the city can resemble a neighborhood. They see the same people on their way in and out of work, shopkeepers know their name, waitresses know their breakfast order, and so forth. City dwellers are quick to list the advantages and the normalcy of city life.
It's important to take note here that many fine graduate schools are also located in these major population zones, and that may prove convenient when it comes time to move ahead in your strategic plan to enter graduate school.
What's It Like to Work in Consulting? There is no "typical" day for a research associate or financial analyst in consulting or investment banking. However, while there may be no daily routines (and that in itself may be an attraction for you), the following activities and roles played are fairly constant over time.
Information Resourcing
These associate positions all require finding answers usually under pressures of time and cost. To succeed, you need to be inventive, be good on the phone, and believe you can do it to succeed. In most consulting and investment decisions, information needs to be of high quality and recent. Providing this information will be a big part of your daily job. Your day will probably begin by scanning several newspapers, watching for business and market information that might prove helpful. Begin that newspaper reading practice now. It'll come in very handy.
Julie DE Galan, one of the creators of the Great Jobs series, is fond of saying that the answer to any question is only "two phone calls away." She has demonstrated this time and time again, sometimes quite dramatically, in delivering the needed information. The persistence and positive attitude that underlies a philosophy of only "two phone calls away" would serve the research associate or financial analyst well in their jobs.
Financial analyst positions at investment banks or in the investment department of larger banks monitor the performance of particular stocks and securities on the world's stock exchanges and stay well informed about the industries they track. Generally, you will focus on one or two industries in this kind of position.
Travel
Long distance travel is more a function of the research associate in the consulting industry than the analyst in investment banking. Some entry level consulting positions can involve a grueling amount of travel. Just as the problems are global, clients can be global as well. Consultants leave the States every day for China, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Many of our largest consulting firms and investment banking services have had a strong European presence for decades. This increasingly far flung demand for consulting/analyst services gives an edge to the individual with language skill and/or cultural sensitivity. Both research and financial analyst positions can involve significant out of the office time in meeting with and working on site with clients. To succeed, you need to be flexible and willing to get up and go. When you are on site with the client, there tend to be correspondingly long days, because your client knows you aren't going home, but to a hotel.
Analysis
Designing or running complicated computer models to evaluate corporations or monitor stock price movement or daily work with numerous databases to retrieve important information will consume much of your time. You will need to become familiar with all kinds of statistical digests, annual reports. Securities and Exchange Commission documents, spreadsheets, and financial market reports.
Whether you need to analyze the investment potential of a foreign firm, the comparable company activity pursuant to a merger, or the involved preparations prior to a public offering of stock, you will encounter data that need to be transformed into usable information by your analysis. This information will then become the basis for the consulting team's action plan for the client.
This manipulation and understanding of data will provide some of the most valuable experience you can bring to your future graduate program. It is perhaps one of the most crucial skills for graduate work; and your ability to transform "data" into "information" should help to make your progress through graduate school a smooth one. You will have an advantage over many of your peers, even those with business experience, because as a consulting associate or financial analyst, you are working for so many different clients on so many different projects that you will develop a broad understanding of resources and relevant techniques.
Presentation
In a consulting firm, for example, the work is underwritten by client fees. Though you may be working on several different projects simultaneously, all your work is client directed and available to the client for examination and review. Attractive presentation of materials is a skill you will begin to appreciate in consulting. The presentation may be a carefully prepared written document with charts and graphs (demanding mastery of software products), or it may be a public presentation with overheads, handouts, and your explanations of your material as well as responses to questions. Creativity, quality work with deadlines, and skills with a variety of presentation techniques are what you will take away from this experience.
Teamwork
As a research associate or analyst, all of your work supports more senior staff people who have the major responsibility for the success or failure of a client contract. Consequently, a team approach is important in everything you'll do. You'll learn to clearly communicate your activities to your team members in order to avoid overlaps, misunderstandings, and wasted effort on anyone's part. This team approach will stand you in good stead in graduate work.
