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Hey guys - I've got a bit of general early-career confusion going on and was wondering if anyone here had some wisdom to drop on me while I'm thinking it over General background: I went through college as a pre-med science major, planning on working for a year or two and going to med school. Since then, I've been working a job at an industry-specific management consulting firm. Recently, I've been rethinking the whole med school thing (all kinds of reasons - mostly just that I was never one of those doctor-or-bust people who can't imagine doing anything else, and spending the next 8 years working my rear end off for no money is looking less and less attractive if the endgame isn't something I'm ultra passionate about). As a result, I'm spending a lot of time thinking seriously about an open-ended professional life for the first time. I'm not 100% in love with what I'm doing now though, either. The company is great - it's small, I work directly with upper management regularly (who are for the most part genuinely brilliant people), and the clients range from startups to gigantic multinationals. On the other hand, there are a lot of hours involved, they're very unpredictable, and client services can feel like being permanently on-call. The pay is great for my age, but not necessarily incredible for the industry/area I live in (lol nyc). Basically, I'm not sure that I want to stay at this job, or even in this industry. A few years of experience in management consulting can open a lot of doors so I'm going to ride it out for now, but there are definitely some questions I'd love to see if anyone can offer some insight on: First, how well does industry-specific consulting experience translate outside of that field (a lot of it seems pretty generalizable - BD strategy, product launch planning, M&A work, etc)? Secondly, my firm is very well respected in the field, but is small and totally unknown outside of it - come time to explore my options, how much of a problem will that be? Is bouncing around a lot early on in my career a really dumb idea? I don't mean leaving five jobs in two years or anything like that, but if I look around for an internal strategy or finance job in a totally different field and don't like that better, will I end up just looking unfocused and screwing myself over in both areas? And, finally, how does internal work compare to something like consulting (mostly with regard to lifestyle/hours, but also in advancement opportunity/anything else that might be relevant).
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Apr 2, 2013 04:22
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| # ¿ May 7, 2024 02:31 |
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That was really helpful - thanks a ton. And yeah, I wasn't talking so small as that, more like ~40 professional staff. Small enough that people don't recognize the name unless they work in the industry.
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Apr 2, 2013 05:10
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