QUOTE(yix17 @ Jul 18 2018, 01:01 AM)
You are not alone in this struggle. It seems like most of the finance grad especially those with pure finance degree will end up drowning in this dilemma upon graduation. Imagine you have invested so much of time & effort in building up a foundation for the field of your interest but all ur dreams & passion can be just easily shattered by the cruelty of real life at one glimpse.
Seemingly, the job demand for this field is scarce and have high entrance barrier. Most of the job openings with such titles: finance assistant/executive/officer... have nothing much to do with the core of finance but focus more on accounting functions. Since most of the fresh entry level jobs require at least one year of experience, you need to be prepared for the fierce competition with other fresh grads and those experienced who are far above par than you. You may survive the pre-screening if you have relevant experience during your internship and previous working. But as what is expected, the scarcity in this job field hardly allows finance grads to land into the relevant job, not to mention for students to secure an internship position which is highly related to this field.
This same goes for those who explore into the accounting field. Fresh grads with finance and accounting are still considerable for accounting entry level job. However, those with pure finance degree will be deemed as lower-tier candidates as they are lacking of the solid accounting background or professional qualifications eg. Acca, MIA. Its hardly for finance grads to go further in this field without professional certs and it takes longer time for them in getting those certs without any exemption due to their non-accounting degree.
Truly agree that its hard for fresh grad to enter into this field even with good academic results. At the end of the day I think that regardless of how fancy is your resume, how good is your interview, the network does matter.
(Ps: Sorry, just found out that i have blabbered too much. Not here to shower you with negative thoughts, but just to share some of my perspectives on this matter. By the way, wish you all the best in your future endeavour.)
Let me share my thought from the other side.
During your study days, you will learn a diverse area in finance. A bit of everything like doing NPV, IRR, cash flow, black-scholes, WACC, ..
You see those things are actually very complicated in practice as compared to theory. As student, most of those things are provided to you and most assumptions are already fixed. In reality, its not. Due to the complexity of such work, you may see a team of people just to come out with the valuation. Different people will do different thing. For example in financial modeling, one may build and design the model, one to input and another one to test multiple scenarios. So, its indeed a steep learning curve for any new grads.
Hence, they prefer people with more in-depth knowledge such as mathematicians, statisticians or actuaries and quants. Even engineers are preferred as they know problem solving skills. The general perception is that it’s easier to teach finance to these people than the other way around.
You are right about network but where you graduate from also matters. For example, Ivy leagues have little issue jumping into finance field even when they have limited background. This is due to the nature of work where they value the ability to learn quickly. The easiest way is to see where they graduate from.