This is to help you decide whether a career in banking or science would be best for you.

People often find it hard to choose between a life dedicated to the meticulous pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and a life dedicated to desperately adding animations to a 38 slide power-point presentation on global equity trends, because its the only way to stop yourself wondering if your boring, chubby husband really is out with his mate Bazza entertaining clients, or if he’s in a bar with his skinny, fawning, awful intern, trying for the third time that month to get into her knickers with a charming mixture of vodka, boasting, and threats.

Multiple Choice

So, to help unravel this conundrum, here’s a questionnaire:

Do you prefer:

A: High-precision optical instruments made by a small company in Bavaria to your exacting specifications.

B: Gucci sunglasses

You find a small amount of cocaine in your handbag at the end of a party. Do you:

A: Take it into the lab next morning, analyse it, and post the results on www.whatsthatcutwith.com

B: Snort it all, and stand on your balcony crying, wondering where it all went wrong.

Would you rather live:

A: In a cramped Victorian flat in Cambridge with your cat Horatio, surrounded by books and pictures, with a little fire in the grate and your old bike in the hall.

B: In a 2 bed flat in docklands with your 42” tv, surrounded by pointless stuff that you bought in an attempt to fill the giant hole in your life that was previously occupied by a sense of purpose and achievement.

Would you rather drink:

A: Formula 237-b — the result of years of study, the formula that could cure schizophrenia and transform the lives of millions. Who cares that formula 236 gave your lab assistant gonorrhoea? So what if 237-a made the mice eat each other? This is the one! The ethics committe? They didn’t understand. Your mentor? Stuck in the past. Only YOU understand the brave new world you are about to enter. ONLY YOU understand what this MEANS.

B: Cristal! Another bottle of Cristal!!!! Bella! Tilly! Zara! Let’s get another bottle and keep going until we forget what a awful mess we’ve made of our lives. Then like, let’s do lunch tomorrow, oh GIRLS I love you so MUCH!

Mostly As? A career as a scientist could be for you.

Mostly Bs? Banking might be the best option. Or suicide.

Personality

The Rothschilds are a great banking family. They rose to prominence and power financing early mega-projects such as the Suez canal and the European railway revolution. They soon became enormously wealthy, powerful, and were raised to the level of aristocracy by European states keen to have access to their vast capital reserves. Here’s a picture of them:

Oh cheer up love it might never happen! Fuck me — if I owned the Suez canal at least I’d fucking swim in it, instead of sitting on a chair in the mud like a miserable bastard having my photo taken with my eight miserable bastard kids. Banking makes you a miserable bastard. Fact.

By way of contrast, here’s a scientist attending a very serious scientific conference with his colleagues. It’s been a long, difficult day with complex presentations on the relationship between energy, mass and the speed of light.

OMG!! They are laughing about the special theory of relativity! ROFL

Let’s just recap at this point:

GET INCREDIBLY VERY RICH = Sit in the mud like a miserable cunt

alternatively

DISCOVER v → 0, c → ∞ = LOL!!

Or in other words,

Banking 0 — 1 Science

Work/life balance

Let’s look at how science and banking can fit in with the rest of your life. Here is a scientist:

Her research focuses on the automatic reconstruction of disfluent and ungrammatical spontaneous speech output via syntactic analysis and linguistic formalisms for meaning extraction.

She looks happy. Happy and well balanced. And pretty! Boy, I wish I were more like her. That’s not just a smile, that’s the smile of someone who knows a whole hell of a lot about linguistic formalisms and meaning extraction. She’s cool. I think she has a nice boyfriend who does something in ceramic engineering and buys her goofy presents. Ahhhhhhh.

But this woman is not smiling. She’s crying. She isn’t crying because she’s a banker. She isn’t crying about the stock prices in the FT, because she’s going to get paid approximately £189,000 regardless of how her fund performs. No, she’s crying because these people are her bosses:

And she had to go with them on their stupid drunken business trip to Dubai and laugh with them as they sat next to each other on the sofa singing along to Bon Jovi and pawing at her hair, in order to get her bonus this year. A bonus that she’ll spend on therapy and prescription drugs to erase the memory of their sweaty leering faces. Mind you, she did earn £189,000, and she does get to wear a suit every day. Tough call.

Wait, what’s this? I hear laughter! Oh, it’s Jenny!

She’s come out of her lab to join us in the coffee room. She’s got 20 minutes to kill while her samples are being analyzed in the mass spectrometer. She’s fun to be around, because she has a personality! She’s widely read, loves baking, and her two kids are simply charming. Sometimes they come in to the lab with her, and all the other scientists let them look at the fun experiments. Dave even let them put their old toys in liquid nitrogen to see what would happen. Those crazy guys! They’re so great to work with!

Hold on! I hear someone else who’s happy and laughing. Oh, it’s Bazza!

He’s come out of his 37th floor office to bray like a tosser into his phone. He’s got 20 minutes to kill after slapping his intern on the arse and telling her to get him a sandwich. What’s he so happy about? YES!! His new Audi A8 has arrived! He’s ringing the lads to tell them that it’s got the custom beige leather interior he ordered. It’s got a dual screen DVD entertainment system. It’s got a power panoramic sunroof. It’s got sport mode suspension. It’s got four fucking wheels and a fucking engine and some fucking windows each with fucking transparent mode because it’s just a fucking car but that’s not going to stop Bazza telling you, me and the lads all about it for the next twenty minutes. Again. Like he did when he saw it in the show room. Like he did when he ordered it. Like he did when he decided actually, he’d rather go for the Front Dual Cooled and Massage Seats instead of the 20” alloys. Bazza is a cunt. If you go into banking, you WILL work with him.

Forever

Hardware

It’s not just about who you work with, whether you have fun, and how satisfied you feel with your life. This is the important matter of what toys you get to play with while you are doing it.

It’s a well known fact that scientists get:

· Giant electric sparks

· Bubbling test-tubes

· Smoke

· Vast computational resources

· Slide rules

· Safety goggles

Bankers get:

· Huge expense accounts

· Sharp suits

· Business class travel

· Gold plated pens

· Chauffeurs

· Handmade shoes

· Prostitutes

At this point, it may appear that bankers are getting a slightly better deal. However, I think it’s important to look at how much things have developed in recent years. For example this:

This is the ATLAS experiment, part of the Large Hadron Collider. It’s 43 metres long. It weighs 7000 tonnes. It’s also

Fucking Awesome.

Let’s look more closely at that awesomeness again, using an info-graphic:

As you can see, the scientist is almost completely surrounded by awesomeness. OMG. That is what I call totally 100% awesome. I love science. WIN.

Banking has also moved forward in recent years. Derivatives are an exciting development in banking. They are fiscal instruments that are abstractions from tangible assets like cash and shares. Here’s a picture of one:

Whoa!!! That looks like some boring shit to me. But this example isn’t entirely clear. Again, we can use an info-graphic to explain these complex financial instruments more clearly, for the benefit of those who may wish to pursue a career in banking:

Careers advisers generally encourage people to move towards awesomeness and away from boring shit and pointlessness, although it’s ultimately a personal decision as to whether you prefer the idea of using a 27km wide machine buried in a super-cooled tunnel under the Swiss alps to find the fundamental structure of matter, or if you prefer the idea of using a spreadsheet to determine some rich bastard’s exposure to a 5 year adjusted loss of liquidity in the far east minerals market. Your. Fucking. Call. But you could listen to your cat, too:

Looking towards the future

It’s unrealistic to try to predict the long term outcome of your career. However, you may find these examples illustrative:

These people are not scientists. They simply illustrate how many scientists feel about life 10-15 years into their career. Their hearts are filled with happiness and companionship, their lives are filled with hard but rewarding work, and they bring golden comedy moments to millions.