I'm a public finance consultant. I work for a company that helps governments and municipalities invest their money. One part of my job is to improve the efficiency of my own company from the inside. The other part is to make deals with outside public sector clients such as local schools, hospitals, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

EDUCATION | I went to undergraduate business school and majored in finance, accounting, economics.

HOW TO GET STARTED | You don't need a finance degree but you need to like finance. Working with numbers. It's not math, it's number crunching. Being able to move numbers around. If you like politics, then this is good too. Political science majors with analytical skills is a nice way to put it.

MUST HAVE TRAITS | A head for numbers. This is finance. Communication skills for when you're working with clients.

how I got started | I knew I wanted to do something finance related. I studied finance in college and looked for finance jobs when I came out. The company that I work for actually has such a good training program that some people come in without an undergraduate degree in business. I have coworkers who were history majors or political science majors. The company will train you in fixed income, financial modeling, VBA modeling [computer programming]. However, a finance, quantitative background definitely helps.

why this job?| I like finance. I think it's fun. I like the action of working on a deal and I like the public sector aspect.

why I love this job!| The difference between my job and a finance job in a bank is that we work with clients like the local or state hospital, universities, entire school districts. We work with everybody. And there's a tangible sense of helping people. I mean, to be honest, I would do this job simply because I love finance. But the truth is that a public finance company has a real-life impact. When we help the State Turn-pike borrow money, they're going to build a road. It's very real. Because of you, they just built a bridge.

my typical day| I'm learning a lot, doing a lot of things, every day is pretty different. On average, I work 9 to 10 hours a day. I do programming, background research, research on a client, say a municipality's, past debt history. Where do I go to get data? It's public information and they should have it listed. Otherwise, I go to Bloomberg [the financial news service] to find it, or our company has a subscription to a data service like Thomson [Financial Securities Data].

what they are | There's a steep learning curve. I had a business background but for those who didn't know, I think it might have been hard at first.

all about growth | We're actually hiring people now. I think it varies firm to firm. At my company, you start out as a consultant and there are three levels of consultant. On average, six months for the first level, another year for the second level, and then you get approved to move on to level 3 if you're good. You spend about 5 years as a consultant, and then as senior management consultant. The top is MD: managing director.

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