How would you answer this question in your Personal Fit interview?
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Ideally you can tie it to non-Finance past experience: what did you not like that Finance can offer.
Additionally, non-Finance careers are relevant, but finance tends to require being a "jack of all trades", e.g. you will be a better VC/PE investor if you have a deep commercial and operational understanding of companies vs. just think "in spreadsheets". You will be a better banker if you understand how companies actually work and what M&A really entails beyond valuation/process.
Here a few thoughts (can be made much more comprehensive, detailed and tailored to PE vs IB vs AM etc.):
- Direct impact on outcomes: decisions involve real capital deployment, not just recommendations (vs. e.g. MBB)
- (More) meritocratic, performance-driven: you’re evaluated on returns and IRR, not slide decks
- Feedback loop is clear: investments either perform or they don’t
- For PE: long-term investing mindset where ops improvement, strategy, capital efficiencies drive value
- Environment: finance tends to attract certain types of people. If you are at the right firm in the right financial industry, this will hopefully mean very driven, deeply intellectually curious people willing to take calculated (!) risks, able to look at (supposedly) easy problems from a plethora of angles (purely financial, commercial, ops, legal, etc.)
Finance interests me because it helps us understand how important decisions are made in the real world. Behind every growing company or new idea, there is usually a financial decision that made it possible. I find it interesting to analyze how money is invested, how risks are evaluated, and how those decisions shape businesses and economies.
What attracts me most to finance is that it combines analytical thinking with real-world impact. It is not just about numbers, but about understanding markets, people, and future opportunities. That combination of logic, curiosity, and practical influence is what makes finance a field I genuinely want to pursue.
I am very fond of numbers and wanted to make my career in finance