Sorry, I wasn’t clear. What I meant and someone else also mentioned, if Cortana just want the title, a big and/or difficult teme is not so important. If instead he’s looking to use it for networking or improve his career, then your teme is probably (very) good.
The objective of a Thesis is that you either:
- Open a new Professional Door, and use it to meet new people or pit yourself in a new direction
- Learn something yourself, and by doing so demonstrate mental flexibility and enjoy new stuff
In this spirit, I would recommend to not focus on any FIRE related aspects. You are already fairly deep on the FIRE topic. From a personal point of view, the marginal utility of additional FIRE insight comes at very high marginal cost. Or better said, heck of work for limited personal insight. On the professional side, and unless you work with Google, FIRE won’t open any career paths as well. It won’t close doors, but it won’t open them.
My recommendation: Think about what your FUTURE job could look like and based on this select a topic that you know enough about to know who to select as a mentor. Thereby, chose a more practical work where you work with data/experiments. Then just knock on that departments’ door internally - and ask for a coffee. Depending on what department you approach, they may likely tell you that your initial idea was garbage BUT that they had some other interesting problems where they just need someone to thoroughly think about things. Play it well and you get either a wider network or even a new job.
Alternatively, take something that is completely new to you and that both allows you to enjoy low marginal cost / high marginal benefit situation from diving into a new topic. There I would take a more theoretic paper where you do literature research. This may be in the context of e.g. mortgage risk management, wealth taxation or hard core macro-economics related to e.g changes to interest rates and the like.
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I‘m 32 years old, working for my bank for 7.5 years and already had a couple of promotions. My next goal is to become Wealth Management client advisor, thus advising clients with 7-8 figure assets. I‘m actually in the middle of the process by having an interview next week for said position.
I really don‘t get why my bachelor thesis has any relevance for my career at this point. Is it really a bad thing to not care about it at all? My grades are good (5.5 average so far) and I just want to finish the whole thing to add it to my CV.
So I‘m looking for a bachelor thesis that will be easy to write. Easy to research literature, easy to make a quantiative poll etc. Thus it should make sense to chose a topic I already know much about?
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The right thesis could be good for your career. If you write something about asset management, then it could be good marketing for you in the future.
These small seemingly insignificant decisions can be hidden inflection points. The difference between someone doing the average and having a good but typical career and someone going beyond average, thinking strategically and going the extra mile towards building an exceptional career in the future.
There’s no right or wrong path. Everybody chooses for themselves which paths they want to travel.
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You might mix the two ways I was talking about by making an easy essay on managing money for very high net worth individuals (or whatever they are called).
I’d say “AI for UHNWI’s asset managers”.
Is that true? Do people really read bachelor Thesis? I thought it’s more about demonstrating some academic skills.
Even PhD Thesis are very rarely read.
In my experience theses are not read. But as a newbie in IT it was very helpful to be able to point to my thesis as a replacement for other practical experience in an adjacent topic. Nobody read it, but I was able to talk about something in detail, point to decent code (even though nobody checked I didn’t have to invent something/lie), and demonstrate the ability to solve a problem on my own.
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It’s also a topic for coffee talk so it might grab some attention if it applies to a useful or interesting theme for your bank (or the members of the symposiums or other events you may attend).
My master thesis got cited in a journal, so it seems at least some people read it. However, I would certainly not expect lots of people reading bachelor or master theses.
I’m not expecting people to read it (in the same way that nobody reads my university degree or other qualifications). Rather it is more about marketing, projecting expertise, credibility etc.
I know people who made a career off the back of writing a book. Nobody read it, but the title was alone to get people to say “he’s the XYZ guy, let’s get him to work on XYZ”.
Just imagine if you were in a competitive tender against somebody who wrote the book on your subject, or whose thesis was in the specialist area.
Or if you were fighting for a promotion spot and that thing could be the difference that gets you the spot and sends your career trajectory a certain way.
I think we have to differentiate between IT, banking, chemistry/physics and other industries. The CEO of Bank Cler for example doesn‘t even have a Bachelors degree and is 10 years older than me. My colleagues all had at least a HF diploma and some a Bachelors degree. Still I‘m the one that got selected as the deputy of my boss. Still I‘m the only one that they see as a branch manager in the near future. I‘m not saying that degrees don‘t matter in banking. But I‘m very sure that nobody is going to care about my BSc thesis.
A former colleague (we worked together for 2 years) finished his BSc last year and is now leading a team of 20 people in Zürich. I asked him for advice regarding my BSc thesis and he also said „Just make it easy for you, nobody is ever going to read it“. And that‘s what I‘m planning to do. Chosing a topic where I already know much about. One that would be fun to write. And it would be something new. There are very few people that heard about FIRE in the first place.
Frankly, these exceptional strategists would, I believe, neither ask for topic suggestions in a forum like this - nor earn a mediocre grade on that thesis.
Given the circumstances, I‘d always recommend to pick a topic that is relevant to one’s job and/or that one has an intrinsic interest in.
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