My motivation behind leaving finance, taking a gap year to get technical, and starting grad school.
*Preface: This is my attempt at organizing the thoughts that lead me to make the biggest decision of my life. Like don’t get me wrong — it feels tacky writing that — but this decision resulted in me leaving a successful career to essentially start from scratch. So I do feel this decision deserves that title.
While writing this, I decided that I wanted to be fully transparent about my history, options, and beliefs — resulting in a more honest story than I would typically share. This may come off as philosophical or boastful at times, but I felt that my honesty would be more interesting and (at best) of value to share.
I would appreciate if you approached this with an open mind and an understanding of this context* 🙂
I was 23 years old and nearing the end of my 2-year contract in investment banking. I had options to take a promotion or to recruit for exit opportunities in PE, VC, or corporate finance.
But I knew I needed to change my career — this wasn’t what I wanted.
This wasn’t a decision made out of the blue either. I had mulled over the question of what my ‘next step’ would be for the better part of the prior year — and I had explored most of the natural exit opportunities available to me.
So, following loads of diligence and self-reflection, I ended up taking a gap year to get insanely technical and study machine learning. I wanted to see if I liked it enough and if so, I would prepare for and apply to research-based master’s programs. If not, then I was going to reassess.
More or less, I was going to start from scratch.
I went from this guy…
…to pet-sitting in Australia, unemployed, studying math and ML all day.
I’m writing this in April 2024 — 10 months into my sabbatical$^1$ — and having just finalized my decision to attend UC San Diego for their MSCS program starting this fall.
So, in an attempt to organize my thoughts in a transparent, succinct manner…
This is why I pivoted.
$^1:$ Literally just unemployed.