Sometimes I wonder if I am making the right decision in my career choices. During my freshmen year, I started out as an accounting student because I had no idea what part of business interested me the most. At the time, my only mentor was a senior accountant at Ernst & Young who told me accounting would be an excellent field. He was right in the sense that the business world had a high demand for accountants and that professionals in the field made lots of money right after graduation. In addition, the Big Four accounting firms budgeted a lot for college recruitment and their leadership training made them the top companies to launch a career. However, after a failed interview for a program during the summer and the economic downtown in 2008, I fell out of love with the profession.
I did not really like my accounting classes and it seemed like students were only in it because they wanted to make money. The classes were not hard, but it was just not something that interested me. During my sophomore year, I slowly began moving towards a career in finance. Although I did not know a thing about financial markets or stocks, I did well in the introductory course and decided I could slowly learn the details about the financial industry. Unlike accounting, every finance student was switching out of the subject because they were afraid of not getting jobs due to the bad economy. During the summer, I took a financial analyst internship working in a corporate setting. To my dismay, financial work did not interest me either. I found that corporate finance was practically 50% accounting and that it was not a very thrilling job.
During my Junior year, I took over the American Marketing Association chapter my friend was in charge of and decided to pursue marketing. I did not especially like marketing students at my school, but I enjoyed learning about consumer psychology and social media technologies. Every marketing student wanted to get into advertising because commercials and graphic design were the only things they knew about. Furthermore, the majority of marketing students at my university were lazy under-achieving students who thought you had to be very good at math to do accounting. This was obviously not true since accounting was mainly based on the rules and only involved elementary math. At the end of my junior year, I took a sales internship that I am currently really pleased with.
It is hard to say if sales and marketing will be the profession I stay with, but one thing is very clear. My end goal is to become a CEO and I cannot accomplish that goal without experience in the front lines of sales. I believe that having this sales experience starting out will give me many opportunities in the future. After a few years, I plan to get my MBA if everything goes well or when I decide that the advanced degree will help me move along in my career. At that time, I might use my MBA to do a career change or just to advance myself within my current company. Wherever I go, I feel ready to tackle the challenges ahead because of everything I have experienced and the careers I have explored.
