Narrow Career Tracks....and Discovering That After All You Are Not Supposed to be a Banker!

Lots of yourg people follow the career track that their peers or parents think might be "cool".  I did!  It was banking.  I spent nearly two years in international banking before I evolved on my own to follow my hunches...what I really liked more....organizational psychology...and graduate school...and then I realized that I was supposed to become an academic.  I was a young professor at the age of 29.

The business field has these huge wide expanses of career..."Marketing"...."finance"...."management"....
....it leaves one wondering..."marketing...what?"...."Finance...what?"...."Manage...what?"

Unlike art, teaching, medicine, the career tracks are wide, not narrow.

The implicit assumption of the system of formal education, parents, teachers is that students will get their education, degrees and life will help them sort it out...in the formal sense, it is all macro...there are no micro resources who can sit down with a student and help find the next step....

After my own undergraduate degree at Wharton, I did my best and chose banking...then I wandered and chose teaching, then back to banking before going to graduate school.  One of my Wharton professors played a big role in that...amazing, he did not have to do it, but he took me to lunch three times at the Penn Faculty Club to discuss career issues with me...out of his way....a true mentor...

I also sought out career counselling back at Penn during these years of wandering my career....it helped me personally to understand I was trying to please others with my choices, rather than finding what I wanted to do.

The breakthrough came when I went back to graduate school, left banking, and discovered organizational psychology and development as fields of study for myself...and I soared...it set my direction as a professional academic, professor, writer, creator....

Business is is a field in which for some it is hard to find one's way.  It is so big and wide, and global....
What helped me was some pain of feeling I was living what others wanted, not what I wanted, and being able with the help of mentors to actually decide and take action...in my mid to late twenties...I was one of the lucky ones....

Admitting what you are passionate about, and finding something you are passionate about is a big first step....