First-person account from a YouTube video where the speaker describes early-career disillusionment with engineering after working in an energy-conservation division of a utility (counting light bulbs for schools/large facilities). After about 18 months they concluded engineering wasn’t for them and leveraged quantitative skills (spreadsheets, financial analysis) to move into a Wall Street analyst role in M&A, describing extremely long workweeks (e.g., 138 hours in one week), competitive analyst programs, and peers from top business schools while they came from a small engineering school in New Jersey.
I worked for a utility company. I was counting light bulbs most of the time for like schools and large facilities. And it was an energy conservation division of a local utility. It was awful. I knew pretty quick that I was not going to be an engineer. I was like 21, 22, looking up at my boss who was 55. If that's what it was like to be an engineer, I didn't want to do that. Sure, there are way cooler engineering jobs out there. But it only took me about 18 months to realize that I could apply my quantitative abilities, spreadsheets and numbers, which I was really good at, and I enjoyed it. I could apply that to Wall Street. So I became an analyst. It was sort of a grunge low level. Worked 138 hours in one week. Yeah, do the math on that. 168 total hours in a week. And there's one week I counted. I was physically in the office or traveling. We were actually doing a deal for 138 hours. Not cool. What's the Delta there? 30 hours I was sleeping divided by seven days. I slept four hours a night on average and regularly 100 plus hours a week. But I was in an environment that really lended itself toward my quantitative abilities. So we were running. It was like a mergers and acquisition type environment and looking at businesses and valuing them and like running comparable analysis, crunching numbers and looking at financial statements. Massively competitive programs. They're Wall street investment banking analyst programs and they're really competitive to get into. And I was alongside like all of the people from Harvard, from Yale, from Wharton, nyu, like all of the top business schools, that's where they all came from. Came from a small engineering school in New Jersey.
