Gen Z Guide to FI

This post is gonna walk through the key things that helped me change careers without going broke to pursue my MBA.

I first wrote about pursuing my MBA to work in film specifically in an earlier post in 2022 – The Weight of Dreaming Big. I knew from the day I started my old job in the middle of nowhere (in 2020 yikes) that I didn’t like it. My friends knew I had a 4 year countdown (I love a good countdown) and a very methodical plan for trying to get a job in the film industry. Was it crazy to work a job I hated to stick to my self imposed 4 year plan? Yes, absolutely. Thinking back, I should have quit probably but no regrets. There was a bigger picture.

So to start off the journey, I saved a portion of my paycheck every month from my very first paycheck. By the time I quit, I think I had 70K saved specifically for my MBA. My degree + living in NYC (Jersey, cough) for 2 years cost close to $300K.The rest of my expenses, health insurance and tuition were covered by scholarships, internship money, part time jobs & the grace of God, universe and so on. I ended up taking out only $6K in student loans which I hope to pay off by end of year. The scholarship in particular helped me stay focused to pursue entertainment and not chase IB or consulting or something much higher paying. I wrote about how I got the scholarship in this post.

Next, how did I actually get a job? I started my MBA stressed because there were so many type A classmates stressing about whether they were gonna be consultants and bankers. I’m an empath and their stress was contagious. That first semester was tough. But, I focused on immersing myself in the media world. I listened to (& still listen to) at least 2 hours of podcasts a day about media, the global economy & business of Hollywood happenings. Again, I realize this is a bit intense but now I can say I have a lot of information about different random things that came up as good context or conversation starters when I was actively networking throughout my MBA.

Getting my internship was a mixture of being in the right place and right time & a lot of pre-work. I got a media internship through winning a national MBA media & entertainment competition. That was crazy! But again, all the random, seemingly worthless information I’d been collecting for many months at that point came in handy. I also had an amazing team with some of the smartest people I’ve crossed paths with in life so far.

The summer I spent interning for the film studio was the key to looking a lot more legitimate in my pivot. That internship plus the two unpaid internship/projects I did with other media companies were really helpful to have on my resume. I was literally asked in every full time interview I had about all three of those experiences.

Then, entering my 2nd year, I had no idea what I was doing. I tried to have 1 or 2 coffee chats every week with people who worked in the industry that I met either organically throughout my MBA or reached out cold on LinkedIn. Media & entertainment recruiting is ‘just in time’ aka everyone that’s serious about it is likely graduating without a job. And that was the case. Most of us did, in fact, not have a job at graduation. But surprisingly, so did a lot of people who interned in consulting and banking and more ‘secure’ paths.

Anyway, I didn’t know what I was doing in the last few months of my MBA other than actively hunting for a job. I broke down the stats for how many job apps and interviews I did in this post. It is a very difficult and brutal job market and I’m grateful that things worked out with this job at Roku. But again, I had been stacking random pieces of information throughout my million podcast episodes, MBA education & weekly coffee chats. I finally sounded like I knew what I was talking about. I can’t forget to thank my homie Claude too.

So, I can now gladly say I pivoted. I technically work in streaming and not film but close enough. It gives me something to continue striving for.

XOXO Gen Z Fire Baby