Editor’s Note: Co-written by Zane Glick, ‘Why I quit finance’ chronicles Neil Shah’s journey first in, then out of Big Finance, with hopes of highlighting the loss of career autonomy amongst aspiring finance students at Yale.

In many elite college spaces, poker is advertised as a direct pipeline to finance professions. Perhaps it’s brash to establish that off the bat, but it’s true. At Yale, a first-year adrenaline junkie has no more golden a thread into Big Finance than on the felt, playing poker. 

As the former president of the Yale Poker Club, I know this better than many. But when I first fell smitten with No Limit Hold’em in high school, the finance industry was nothing more than a fantastical profession in the movies. All that mattered to me then was that poker was a math-based card game I could geek out over while socializing with my math-fearing friends. 

The big picture, which I have only realized post-adolescence, is that poker was the first thing in my life to bridge math and companionship. When I matriculated to Yale, I used poker to search for friends, bombarding the direct messages of every member of the incoming class of 2025 to join my poker Discord server. It was in this way that I eventually discovered the Yale Poker Club. 

YPC was my safe haven during my underclassmen years. Many a Friday night was spent at card tables, or rather, in WLH, playing with future quants and investment bankers. This crowd was unlike my buddies at home, but we quickly grew close as a result of “poker talk” — an almost indecipherable language poker players use — as well as our similarly meditative philosophies toward the game. 

Without digressing any further GTO wizardry or unnecessary details about NLH, the meditation in profitable poker comes from the acceptance that the correct decision will often be tainted by bad luck. Take chess, the quintessential strategy game. The winner of essentially every individual chess game is determined by which player has the most strategic prowess. This is true of poker — but only in the long run. Unlike chess, there is no telling when fortune will favor your opponent in any given poker hand. Say they hit the unlikely card that gives them the better hand, leaving you in emotional shambles, practically penniless. 

In this way, being a profitable poker player necessitates you to focus on what you can control. You must trust strategic heuristics, not obstructive emotions. 

Alas, Yale being Yale, it wasn’t long before this newfangled mentality found corporate application. I stumbled across quantitative trading — the prospect of metaphorically playing poker with the market. 

Unlike the “Wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort archetype despised by many, most quant traders track to math geeks with a knack for strategy. And, when I explored the field for myself, I could not find a single quant trader who hadn’t played and loved poker. My curiosity confirmed my destiny with irrefutable anecdotal evidence. 

The role of a quant trader, put in a way that is admittedly a little vague, is to help finance firms build an informational advantage over each other by weaponizing probability models for risk-savvy investments. Sound familiar? But there is a massive, genetically modified maraschino cherry on top — Quant traders are usually signed into a $400,000 salary right out of college. 

Soon, nothing mattered more to me than landing an internship in quantitative finance. Goodbye short-term variance, hello six figures.

—

With a career path crudely compassed out, I dedicated the next two years of school hunting for an offer letter. Back then, my life was a limbo between interviews, my self-worth entirely dependent on perceived career progress. When the end of my sophomore year had yielded not a single tangible success, I sunk into my mind’s darkest depths, staying afloat with a prescribed wellness technique — think about blessings; don’t linger on failure. Bad beat, as us poker degens say.

True to results-oriented opportunism, when I was probably a couple weeks of introspection away from salvation, I woke up one day to my dream suddenly come true — one of Wall Street’s largest hedge funds wanted me to work for them. I was alive again, my life reinvigorated with purpose, all thanks to an email. I obliged immediately. 

This myopic career choice was sponsored by Big Finance — Why waste time cultivating something internal when an overload of external validation might be an interview away?

From the moment I moved into my lower Manhattan high-rise, I knew my internship would be idyllic. My project was filled to the brim with open-ended problem-solving and scratched that ever-present math-minded itch in my brain. Further, I felt a sense of as-seen-on-TV camaraderie among my coworkers and had the luxury of time to sustain friendships with them outside of work.

Frankly, I had the time of my life. With a return offer in sight, I was finally complete.

As the summer of 2024 ended, my best friends and I drove to Acadia, Maine, the weekend before class began. In the grand granite peaks off the Atlantic coast, we hiked, we drank, we bonded. On the final night, we sat around a campfire and recounted how far we had come since our first year. 

Eventually, the conversation trotted toward summer internships. 

Throughout the trip, I had been frothing at the chance to flex my NYC escapades, my collection of Wall Street executive back-pats and my brand-name company merchandise. I recall feeling an implicit sense of superiority over my friends, whose internships were not riddled with fancy dinners, guest speakers and other forms of corporate-sponsored pampering. In short, I was an asshole. 

I heard them out nonetheless. 

Boris used data to identify faults in antiquated Connecticut natural gas systems — issues that, if left unaddressed, could lead to gas leaks and deadly explosions. Tam did machine learning research for Cornell, automating lesion classification through 3D modeling techniques. Jonah worked alongside Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport to design a state-of-the-art cooling plant for new terminals planned for construction in the coming decade.

As they listened intently to each other, I realized that these were not the same young men I met in my first year. They had grown more introspective, grounded and driven to leave a mark on humanity in good faith. Here were the scientists and engineers — sorry for the lack of Humanities representation — that elementary school teachers said we would be; here were the real life superheroes society depends on to solve its problems.

When it came to me, my tongue was tied — no, sliced clean off! Did I just spend three years of my Yale experience trying to find a hamster wheel to run on? I don’t give a rat’s ass about hedge funds! Yes, I did stuff for a company, but what did I do for myself? For the world? If this is how I feel now, when outlooks are best, what will I feel when I’m crunching over time? 

I spent two to three minutes mulling over it all, around that bonfire, under a blanket of stars and galaxies. My loss for words was so profound, that even addressing what I said next does the silence a great disservice. There is only one thing that matters — Big Finance is not for me. 

— 

In the weeks after Acadia, I scrounged my network of finance friends in search of answers. Instead of hearing the usual a-dream-come-true tale, each endured strings of verbal abuse: “How can you justify going to Yale just to make rich people richer? Look at what’s happening in the world! These finance conglomerates are monstrous, tentacled beasts, investing every ounce of operative power on profiting off the exploitation of the working class!” I didn’t say that verbatim, but one can imagine me being impassioned enough to do so.

Anyway, such arguments led me nowhere. There is no refutation of fact — Big Finance is necessary in a monied society. It funnels investor savings to business owners who need capital to expand. It optimizes risk management, stimulates economic growth, and — my personal favorite — promotes liquidity. Clearly, it was never about tangible progress, but intangible profits. Jargon aside, it wasn’t long before I learned that explaining away an entire industry is futility of the highest order.  

There is one social issue that no firm can refute — they cause societal brain drain. Illustrious finance institutions have successfully marketed themselves as the dream destination for precocious students. These firms strive to employ the most hungry, brilliant and impeccably educated young minds schools like Yale have up for grabs. 

Jane Street, the premier quantitative finance firm, is particularly proud of its intellectual diversity. “Our company is only as strong as its people,” they write on their website. “And it’s only by embracing people of all backgrounds that we can reach our full potential.” 

This might be great on paper. But I find it terrifying! Can you imagine what the world would look like if all the smart people from all backgrounds wanted to work for Jane Street? We’d have no smart people left!

Jokes aside, a world where all the smartest people have been bribed to work in the most lucrative industry is undeniably dystopian. Fortunately for humanity, reality is far from the case; Jane Street says so themselves! In their two-part seminar for new interns called “Jane Street’s Role in the World,” they admit they can’t pull a doctor out of the operating room and into the office, saying verbatim, “If you’re passionate about saving lives, please go do that instead.” 

This is a convenient excuse. Jane Street is clearly aware that college-aged adults know little of such certainty. Careers for people our age are rarely absolute, and whatever certainty has been established thus far is often no match for the whopping entry-level salaries dangled in front of us. 

Jane Street is widely considered finance at its best. At its worst, finance firms won’t even pretend to care about offering their interns an in-depth understanding of what they’re signing up for. Instead, these firms only care about undercutting one another, pushing post-undergrad recruitment as early as sophomore year. Many Yalies don’t even have a major picked out by then!

What is insidious about it all, is that as Big Finance prowls across college campuses, searching for students to ensnare, the potential hires are largely blind to the systematic career poaching going on around them. When career paths bordering too good to be true are waggled right in our faces, of course, we gravitate toward it! What greater reward for our education than a high salary and prestige! As our peers race to apply to the Yale Student Investment Group, the Yale Undergraduate Consulting Group, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, we race to follow suit. It is only natural. 

— 

So, what should we do with such knowledge? 

There’s no shortage of documentation putting everything wrong with our corrupt system on display. It’s seriously gotten to a point where apathy to world events feels like the only sustainable way to preserve our mental health, a numbness necessary to stop spiraling down the slide of despair. 

Any apathetic person will find quitting finance impossible. Even without apathy, passing up such a bombastically pocket-plundering career path without job security is like throwing a parachute pack from a plane and then jumping out after it. There are loans to be paid, parents to be retired, kids to be raised — an endless, ever-expanding laundry list of immediate reasons to look past the fact that the Yale student body is being used for corporate gain. It’s our decision to join Big Finance after all, right? 

And, as a 21-year-old with little actual job experience, I hold trepidation about offering concrete advice to my peers. Distilling folk wisdom can’t capture the multitudes of millions, and one man’s opinion will do nothing but provoke thought. 

I’ll give it my best shot anyway.

No matter the tactics Big Finance employs on working populations, it cannot reprogram the secure, intrinsically motivated mind. So, I ask everybody reading to find the courage to seek out this security. Or, rather, remind yourself that it exists within you already! Nobody needs an offer letter to justify their existence; birth alone suffices, and look at how far you’ve come from that — You’re at Yale! Just don’t forget why you’re at Yale, why you are studying what you study, who you want to be for yourself, for the world. 

If you do soul-search, find it successfully, and finance is still the most pragmatic career plan post-college, then the best, least-corny thing I can say is to “live below your means.”

I know I just dogged on folk wisdom, so allow me to explain. 

Each passing year in finance marks an increase in your disposable income. Unless you have rebuked apathy, you will be lured toward external niceties, away from internal gain, toward luxury, and away from self-love. There will be a powerful urge to invest excess into excess, to hoard more as you make more, an urge amplified by coworkers and college friends, people you care for, flaunting flashy, soulless lives. If this sounds apocryphal, I assure you it is reality. That is the culture of Big Finance. Everybody is like that. Unless they’ve read this article and internalized the message, in which case, they’re pretty chill, down-to-earth people, and you should be their friend. 

In any case, my practical advice is to internalize that a career in finance — maybe a career in anything — must be a means to something greater and not an end. In doing so, the script will flip; you are using finance firms instead of letting finance firms use you. 

NEIL SHAH is a senior in Benjamin Franklin College majoring in Computer Science. He was the president of the Yale Poker Club from 2022-2023. He can be reached at n.shah@yale.edu.

ZANE GLICK is a junior in Ezra Stiles College majoring in humanities. His work for the News spans the WKND and Opinion desks, the latter of which he is a columnist for. He can be reached at zane.glick@yale.edu.