Welcome to the Finance, Consulting, Business & Entrepreneurship Community!
Each of these areas are unique and some take a specialized skill set or particular mindset that can be obtained during your time at Tufts. Some common threads running through them include an interest in working in the fast-paced environment of the private sector, while thinking, solving problems, and communicating with internal and external clients.
Finance is our first stop, and in this field people and companies focus on raising, investing, managing, and growing money, also called capital. Common areas of finance where people begin as analysts include Investment Banking (IB), Sales & Trading (S&T), Asset Management, Private Banking, Commercial Banking, and Corporate Finance. Less common first jobs include work in Hedge Funds, Private Equity (PE), Venture Capital (VC), or Real Estate (R/E).
Consulting is the business of providing expert advice to a specific group of people, which means that companies needing help hire a consulting firm to look at their problems, perform research, analyze the situation, and suggest solutions. Consulting can also be broken into several areas that people will enter directly out of undergraduate, graduate, or PhD programs. The two most common areas are Management Consulting and Strategic Consulting; however, there are also several specialties such as to Life Sciences, Human Capital, Economic, Financial, and Automotive Consulting.
Entrepreneurship can include setting out on your own, or with co-founders, to launch a new business (maybe with some seed funding from the Venture Capital firm we mentioned above) with the hope of generating a profit. However, to others, entrepreneurship means joining one of the many startups that are launched each year and helping that company grow from the ground up. No matter which path you take, your work will be varied. Many startups have an “all hands on deck” mentality, which means you may be involved in several aspects of the business and your role can morph and change very rapidly.
Last and by far the broadest category is Business. Some will argue that any non-specialized role in the private sector is a role in Business, and there is some merit to that thought. However, in this community we are focused on Rotational Programs, Sales, Operations, and Human Resources.
