Hello and welcome. I'm Patrick Curtis, your host and Chief Monkey, and this is the Wall Street Oasis podcast. Join me as I talk to some of the community's most successful and inspirational members to gain valuable insight into different career paths and life in general.

Let's get to it.

In this episode, liberal arts banker shares his winding path from a small liberal arts

college to VP at Goldman Sachs in investment banking. Learned why he started out in a trading role,

why he jumped to a prop shop after a few years,

his advice on trying to build a career as a trader, as well as why he pivoted to IB with an MBA.

Enjoy.

Liberal Arts Banker, thanks so much for joining the wall street doaces podcast hey thanks for

having me so it'd be great if you could just give the listeners a short summary of your bio

so i've been doing finance for about 15 years now um i started out of undergrad trading

different kinds of derivatives both in kind of a market-making capacity

at first and then a proprietary capacity, you know, for a couple years after that.

Phenomenal timing, you know, if you think back about 15 years ago, to go into trading

right before the start of the global financial crisis.

And during that time, I enjoyed trading, but I saw the writing on the wall in terms of, you know, where the trading job market was going, which, you know, obviously had a couple tough years there through the late 2000, you know, single digits and into the early 2010s.

So it decided it was a good time to go back to business school, got my MBA, you know,

a top 20 MBA program, not, you know, one of the top three or four, but with a definite eye into going into banking.

You know, banking from my perspective at the time gave such a wider skill set and a transferable

skill set and the corporate training to go get many different types of jobs. So everyone agrees

that traders here. You need to be smart, need to be analytical, you need to be have a great attention

to detail. You need to be good under pressure but you know

i didn't even know what ebidat was at the time yeah and it's hard to convince a corporate finance department

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