Curriculum · Careers

Careers in
finance

What the jobs actually involve, described by the professionals who presented at our sessions — not the version in films.

"Finance" is not one job. It is a set of quite different professions that happen to share a vocabulary. Knowing which one you are describing is the first useful step.

The main paths

  • Investment banking. Advising companies on raising capital and on mergers. Junior work is modelling, valuation, and presentation material, under long hours.
  • Asset and wealth management. Investing other people's money — either institutional portfolios or, in private wealth, individual families over decades.
  • Private equity and venture capital. Buying into private companies and improving them. Analytical work plus a great deal of judgment about people.
  • Quantitative research and trading. Statistics and code applied to markets. Closer to research engineering than to anything else on this list.
  • Corporate finance. Inside an ordinary company: forecasting, budgeting, and deciding which projects get funded.

What the day actually looks like

Across all of these, the work is mostly reading, spreadsheets or code, and meetings in which you must explain a number to someone who will act on it. Communication is not a soft skill here; an analysis nobody understands has no value.

Hours differ enormously. Banking is famously demanding early on. Corporate finance and much of asset management are ordinary professional jobs. Both are finance.

What actually helps in high school

  1. Take mathematics as far as your school allows, and statistics if it is offered.
  2. Learn Excel properly, then learn Python. Both are used daily.
  3. Write. Clear short prose is rarer and more valued than students expect.
  4. Read one financial paper regularly for a year; the vocabulary becomes automatic.
  5. Build something small and real — a valuation, a tracker, a club — and be able to discuss it.

Credentials such as the CFA come much later, and firms train the technical mechanics themselves. Curiosity and reliability are the traits people actually hire for early.

How to ask someone about their work

Most professionals will give a student twenty minutes. Ask what a normal Tuesday looks like, what they'd do differently, and who else you should speak to. Then send a short thank-you note. That sequence, repeated, is how careers in this field actually begin.

Next

For the technical side, read AI & quantitative finance, or meet the professionals who teach with us on our team page and at our events.