Question about Jobs in Finance

I had become interested in majoring in finance. However, I talked with a financial planner and there were some things that really turned me off. He said that many people don’t make it in his career because they don’t get enough in assets to manage to keep their job. It pretty much became a job on how many wealthy people you know or how many you could get to use you as their financial planner. I don’t really like this type of job. Correct me if I’m wrong but this is what people refer to as “front end” right? Is there a lot of opportunities for something more behind the scenes like managing the finances of a company, quantitative stuff, risk assessment, etc? I like talking to and working with people, but the first type of job I described seems more about building a client base than actually working with their finances. The latter(“back end” I think?) is what I would prefer. Is this a realistic goal or is the first type more common for finance majors?

Forgot to add, but would the two types of jobs I described be the difference between personal finance and corporate finance?

Finance is far more vast than you’re making it out to be. Sure, there are CFPs (Certified Financial Planners) and that is an aspect of finance, but so would banking - for example, you could become a loan officer for a bank, and even within that you could focus on business or personal loans. You could venture into investment banking and private equity, working for third party firms who own and oversee corporations; you could get into trading and work on a stock exchange or mercantile exchange. You could also go into corporate finance, where you would do analysis and forecasting.

Finance as a major has even more applications than finance as a career. With a finance major you could get into consulting, which is a whole world in and of itself (management, strategy, technology, different niches). Think of a finance major as a foundation. If you graduate with a bachelor’s degree (either in finance or in economics with a concentration in finance), you will have no hard skills and you will not be disqualified from much of anything. You will think in a way that is conducive to training in a wide variety of careers, so you will not need to worry about being limited in that way. Really the only thing that would cause difficulty is the economic situation when you graduate (imagine being a finance major graduating in 2009, just after half the companies and all the jobs went away!), but you can’t predict the economy 4-6 years out (real estate seemed like a good gig in 2005… not so much in 2008), much less how you will wind up 40-50 years from now.

If I were you, I’d explore all of the different things that finance majors wind up doing before you write it off. More importantly, don’t stress too much about finding a major before you really need to declare one in your sophomore or junior year of college. It’s more important to identify target schools and programs and then to figure out what your options are from there.

@chrisw Thank you! The other aspects seem much more in line with what I want to do. How important are “target schools” outside of investment banking though? I have looked into Georgetown as a reach but some other schools I’m thinking of(Lehigh, Bucknell) aren’t really considered “targets” but have great placement and recruitment for consulting.

To be clear, I meant “target schools” as in your personal targets - where you would feel most comfortable spending four years of your life. A bad fit at a great school is not conducive to learning.

Big business recruitment is a big deal, and if you are looking to work at the top companies, you would need to go to one of their targets, and that isn’t limited to investment banking. With that said, working at Goldman or JP in I-banking or working at Bain or BCG or McKinsey in consulting isn’t the be-all-end-all of those industries. You can start in a regional or niche company (for example, you could get into a PE firm that concentrates on medical technology in the Midwest) and build a career from there. Some people enjoy the niche market, stake their claim to it and grow within it; others use those kinds of jobs as building blocks to get to future jobs.

Outside of the top companies, who do generally recruit only at a handful (a few dozen) schools, there is plenty of opportunity for people who go to schools that don’t have the brand recognition of Georgetown, Harvard, Stanford, etc. And don’t forget, just going to a school doesn’t mean anything besides having a recruiter come to it; you still need to have the grades to get an interview, which isn’t too easy!

To give you an idea of a possible path, here is mine: I majored in political science and had no internships in college (and not for lack of trying, either!); I wasn’t in any business clubs or fraternities… I was in the glee club; my GPA was 3.07 when I was going through recruitment, which meant that I didn’t even get interviews with top and mid tier companies. I wanted to get into management consulting so very badly, but it was 2010 and the jobs were just not there yet, even if I were qualified (which I wasn’t!).
Out of 50-ish applications, I had seven first interviews, two second interviews (one with a restaurant consulting firm and another with a sales consulting firm) and wound up with two offers (one in Las Vegas and one outside of Philadelphia). I started in this niche Philadelphia consulting firm and then moved to a niche software company, and just recently I moved to a management consulting firm.

My point is that you don’t need to fit yourself into a box to market yourself to businesses, and you definitely shouldn’t try to fit yourself into a box to succeed in business.