For those close personal friends of mine, they probably have seen it coming, since I had been spewing out a lot about financial things for the past couple of years. Now I am not saying I am a financial wizard that can triple my investment in a year time, but it has been a growing interest of mine. The fact that many of my friends here in Singapore do work in financial industry kinda like pulling me more and more towards this thing. It's kinda like an inevitable thing, I suppose.
I have spent about 2 years of my life in engineering industry before I realized that it is not the right thing for me. Which makes me wonder why did I choose to go and study it in the first place. I think the biggest reason in the first place is just how I was brought up in the family. My grandfather, as my dad said was a carpenter(in a way engineering and technical person), and my dad is an engineer. Has been one for more than 30 years and still working as an engineer.As the only son in the family, I was brought up knowing that the heritage of the male of the family to be a technical person. I am not blaming nor saying he pushes me into it, but when you spend years listening to your dad talking about engineering and technical things to you, it kinda gives you an idea that you should be one too!
The other reason that I can think of is how the education system is in Malaysia. I did quite good when I was in school back in Malaysia, and the way how education system works in Malaysia is that students with good grades are pushed towards studying the core sciences subjects which eventually will make them ended up with Medicine or Engineering career. Any Malaysians would agree with me if I say back in the high school life, if you were to take the economics or accounting, you are considered second rated, and people will ask you "you're not good enough to get to sciences class??". People will look at you thinking you are a dumb brick with not-so-bright-future. Little that those high school kids know about the paycheck of people in financial industry. No offense to those people that took the economics/account but it was what it was, right? Which is kinda sad, because let's face it, high school kids are just gonna choose the best they think they could get(which in this case the science classes), but not really what they want. But then again, high school kids mostly don't really know what they want (at least I could say that for myself). Which brings me back to the first reason, that I thought I wanna be an engineer because my dad and my granddad was one.
I am going to write a bit about the recruitment process that I went through to get this job. Actually I started looking for a job with intention of just testing the water. I only sent out resumes to very few companies, mostly are big mainstream banks you have seen their advertisements in major sport events. I didn't put too much hope into it and just be glad if I could get a reply. But after a few days I got a reply from this company that I am working with, and also another very famous(or infamous depending on your POV) American investment bank. I got the job only after one interview, and the process took me less than 2weeks, which is considered super fast. To think that I had spent 6months++ to get my previous job after sending out a lot of resumes to oil and chemical companies, and a couple of weeks to get a banking job. I checked my bachelor degree just to make sure it is written Chemical Engineering, not Finance.
I guess things worked in my favour because this company just lost 2 of their Japanese staffs and they needed a replacement asap. Having a third language ability doesn't look too bad yeah? The very reason why I don't really regret to find this financial job at a later stage of my life, because the journey that I went through helped me into it. After all it is not just about the destination, but the journey getting there. And now that I am here, I just have to figure out which part or specific job I wanna do? client advisory? stays in operation?client onboarding? transaction filtering/investigation? product specialist? Interesting how I write client advisory in the first order....hehe.
All in all, I spent 2 years of my life in engineering and I didn't like it. I am not bashing engineering line, but I was just a man in a wrong place. I may have been working harder or longer as compared to my previous jobs, but at the end of everyday, I feel satisfied and I feel a sense of achievement. I am happy. After all, you are still going to work for tens of years of your life if you are not a child of a millionaire like me, so you better at least make sure you are happy. And different people gets happy over different things.
I am home, and I am happy
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