Wall Street is a game that’s played between the smartest people in the world with the highest stakes. –A portfolio manager

Ten years ago (that makes me sound like an 80 year old)…. anyway, ten years ago, I’d never have imagined a career other than programming, technology and software. And yet, here I am, a world away from that path, still a bit dazed as to how I got myself here. Nonetheless, these are exciting times and I look forward to learning everything about my new career. As the portfolio manager in the quote above puts it, it’s not an easy career, but it sure is thrilling and never lets you rest.

Here are the top cool things about my job that I’m pumped about (in no particular order):

• Exposure. Early exposure (we’re talking the first few weeks), first-hand, to businesses and company management (CEO, CFO, COO and senior management).
• Impact. Amazing opportunities to come in and create impact worth surprising amounts of money to hundreds of thousands of people.
• Divergence. A career in a business that rewards originality of thought, relentless curiosity and standing apart from the crowd.
• Learning. A job that pays you to learn more about business strategy, and more generally, about the world around you.
• Travel. Put simply, the mandate is to do whatever is required to get my job done, and get it done right. Go anywhere, do anything, no questions asked. Except, well, um, performance.
• Autonomy. Almost absolute autonomy of everything: working hours, travel, research. There are very few (if any) reins to hold analysts back. They get to define the rules of the game and play it in a way that suits them. The only pressure is from the capital markets, which, as you might imagine, is substantial.
• Resources: Amazing resources at our disposal to help us get our jobs done. Almost everything is either a click or a phone call away. It’s kinda scary. There are no real excuses for screwing up.
• Triangulation of careers. Investment management is unique in a lot of ways. But one way that appealed to me above anything else was the fact that it offered a career that combines the thrill of trading, the exposure of strategy consulting and the impact of investment banking. And it blends the best characteristics of each.

I’ll be jotting down more about what exactly my job is sometime in the future (most people don’t quite get it), this is more of a short snippet that I wanted to pen for two reasons: (1) so I don’t forget it myself, heh, and (2) I haven’t updated the blog in a while, so I thought it might be a good idea to put something up.

Elsewhere: