Sample Essay On My Career Path

It goes without saying that to choose the right career path is, probably, one of the most difficult and fateful decisions, one has to take in his or her life. The difficulty is that nobody will give you any instructions or a guidebook on how to choose the right career path without any curves. It is a decision that a person has to make himself or herself. To choose the right career path, it’s important to understand what is your cup of tea and what’s not. Not many people can boast of the fact that they knew what they would be doing since childhood or when choosing a university. As far as I am concerned, at the moment, I'm doing Dean's Scholarship at Drexel University, Philadelphia PA, with Finance as major. As you can understand, I don’t belong to this minority group of lucky people either.
So, how did I get involved into the finance area? In college my major was electrical engineering and this choice definitely wasn't based on a well-reasoned decision. I simply was good at Math and Physics and at that very moment, I didn't know what to do in my life and applying to a college with engineering as major seemed to me very attractive. Of course, I went on different co-ops but, unexpectedly, it turned out that engineering pace is too slow for me. At the same time, I started investing the money I earned. By and by I started to feel a great interest in economy and investing. I had CNBC app on my smartphone to have a quick access to latest financial information or breaking business mood in a real-time mode, to keep track with the stock market on regular basis. I felt so passionate about asset classes and their correlation. It's always fascinated me, how oil drop has such an impact on the global market, for instance.
Having understood my interests and in what professional area I would like to develop myself, I took an opportunity to get employed as Market Services Analyst at PJM Interconnection. My activities among others were mostly related to reporting, e.g. I created reports on variance analysis and financial key performance indicators to be used by senior leadership in evaluating PJM's 12-months strategic plans and projects. Afterwards, for a certain period, I had some duties at Drexel University Endowment Fund and parallelly was CEO and Co-founder of Srockjock LLC, Philadelphia PA. StockJock (www.stockjock.co) was a fantasy stock market game. It was awarded as the first winner of Philadelphia Startup Weekend Competition. My responsibilities were related to financial budget preparation, forecasting revenue and expenses as well as fund-raising. More creative component of my activities included planning and implementation of marketing projects, brand expansion and social media engagement, company's future expansions and one more vitally important task was to establish long-term strategic partnerships and plan for the company’s future expansion.
After this, I took up the vacancy of Summer Financial Analyst at Barclays Investment Bank where I completed a rotational internship with Financial Planning & Analytics (FB&A) and Equity Derivatives Product Control. Within this short internship I had a wide range of responsiblities, like Support budget, forecasting, and headcount processes for Global Credit Products trading and sales Within FB&A like conducted detail weekly commentary and summary about the movement of the Global Market and gave training presentations on various topics, such as different strategies in Options Trading, risks in Correlation Trading, etc.
This how looks my career path as of now. It's obvious that's not an easy one and consists of numerous steps. But it doesn't matter how difficult these steps are, as I'm sure today that I'm on the right path where I can achieve success.