What I love most is Learning

[Ari]

Hello,
I'm about a year away from getting my PhD in astrophysics, and I'm very uncertain about leaving/staying in academia. If I leave, there's a good chance I'll enter finance.

After a lot of thinking, I realized what I love most about my life as a grad student is that every single day I'm learning something new (getting stronger/smarter/etc.), not necessarily the astrophysics research itself. For example, over the past 8 months I've solely been building an N-body integrator for planetary dynamics (i.e. doing numerics, not science), and I've had a blast doing it.

Onto my question: In your experience, do financial institutions have interest in helping their employees learn/be smarter/grow, or is it about meeting deadlines at all costs? I'm not talking about whether financial institutions coddle incompetent employees who are "trying to grow" but really just can't get things done. I'm more asking about whether there's opportunity for employees to try new ideas (and the institution be okay if it happens to fail), or if it's more about having an employee do one (or a few) thing(s) well over and over again. Again, it's also a different situation if all the institution cares about is meeting deadlines and the employees happen to grow in the process. Is there explicit interest by institutions (which ones?) to grow their employees? Does the size of the institution matter?

Maybe I sound naive in even asking these questions haha. Just trying to get a lay of the landscape.

Thanks in advance,
Ari

 

[Tom Maloney]

In your experience, do financial institutions have interest in helping their employees learn/be smarter/grow... or if it's more about having an employee do one (or a few) thing(s) well over and over again.

Generally the latter more than the former. You'll find some companies / groups / bosses that are the exception. Unfortunately, sorry.

 

[Ken Abbott]

Within the sphere of their commercial interest, yes - firms encourage you to expand your knowledge of the business and usually pay for at least part of any tuition you incur. If you look well beyond your area - if you were a desk analyst who wanted to take law school courses, for example, they would likely resist.

The bigger challenge is fitting it into your schedule. I did two graduate degrees at night and I can tell you firsthand that it can be brutal. I'd often go to class at night and then return to work afterward. Fortunately I was able to combine work and school projects.

 

[Tom Maloney]

If you push yourself, of course, you'll learn new things. But don't expect the work environment to be conducive to learning. You are going to be the driver of your own education, no one else.

 

[Ari]

Really appreciate the responses from the big guns. I'll have to think on this. I mean, as a phd student, taking your own initiative and driving your own education is not a new thing, the difference I guess is that in the financial world it's considered a bonus, instead of a primary focus.

Seems a bit strange to me that this is the dominant way, since I've gotten the impression (from other threads on this forum) that there's not enough qualified people, and a ton of semi-qualified people.