Starting with Finance

By Shreya Gupta ('22 Grad, Manufacturing Pilani). She is enthusiastic about finance and has a minor in the same. In her quest to explore more, she has pursued finance, operations, strategy and supply chain-based internships, served in the Placement Unit of BITS Pilani, and is now a Manufacturing Manager at HUL.

As a final year student soon to be sitting for my placements, I often wondered what advice I would have given to my once timid, unconfident 17-year-old self who walked into the pearly gates of BITS Pilani with a bag full of ambitions and confusion, ready for my next roller coaster ride. 

While I am a strong believer in the fact that both my successes and failures are equally a part of my journey, I would still want to give a set of advice to people who are as confused as I was. 

In my first year, I was so curious about everything happening on campus that I committed to more than what I could digest or even manage. I made my first novice mistake of scoring very low in my 1-1 (I was a borderline 7). As dull as it may sound, CGPA is important. Especially when you are confused, it keeps such opportunities open for you which even you are not currently aware of. Scoring well in your initial semesters ensures that you get a lot of time available in your 2nd and 3rd year to explore the opportunities you might be interested in (a small example would be how my GPA in 3rd year ensured most shortlists in an internship season I never planned to sit for but ended up appearing anyway).

Throughout my first year, I managed to explore various fields out of which I found Finance and specifically the statistics used in finance extremely intriguing. Other than focusing on improving my GPA, I began to prepare for FRM. It was difficult for me to grasp a lot of concepts by reading from the books because I started with negligible knowledge in the field. 

It took me almost a year of dedicated studying to get my CG to a decent 8+ and qualify FRM Level 1 with the 1st quartile in Quants and Financial markets. To know more about my preparation strategy, head over to this article.

If you are looking to pursue a finance job straight out of college, FRM or a CFA might not be immediately useful. It will help you gain knowledge in the field and definitely add a feather to your cap. However, the first level costs nearly INR 60,000, so my suggestion would be to first go through the material, understand if you’ll be able to self-learn and only then apply for the exam. 

For a job out of college, the best ways are to maintain a good CGPA and offshoot score of 40+/50. 

Throughout my 3rd year, I got the opportunity to be mentored by an amazing set of professionals who could help me navigate through the mistakes they had once created, so my final advice would be: We can’t change the fact that an online semester isn’t as engaging as an offline semester, but what is in our hands is to utilise the time to our fullest, grabbing every opportunity available to learn and grow.

In short, my top 4 advice to anyone reading this would be:

• Maintain a high CGPA (8+) in your initial semesters so that you can enjoy your later years of undergraduate. You always have the chance to increase your CG later on, but it gets tougher after every sem.

• Find a domain that truly interests you and go out of your way to learn about it

• The online semester has blessed us with a lot of free time, utilise it to take up internships and other mentorship opportunities to prove your own credibility.

• Last, but definitely not least, don’t stress and enjoy the process, it is only these memories that you’ll remember the rest of it doesn’t matter as much. 😄