My Philosophy
I grew up in a small poor village in Vietnam. When I was a child, I wanted to learn how to play the piano. I wanted to learn how to play chess. I wanted to learn how to swim. I wanted to learn many things but I wasn’t able to, simply because I did not have access. My village did not have access to teachers, materials, nor facilities. That lack of access for someone who actively wanted to learn something deeply sadden and bothers me, to this day.
When I was 16, I was given an opportunity to go overseas with a scholarship, and that changed my life forever. I went to the LSE for university, then become an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, now running several of my own businesses. I experienced that a single access changes everything.
One main reason why I got to Goldman Sachs is because many seniors gave me access to their cover letters and tell me about their interview experience, to which I am still thankful until this day. Again, access to this information changes the course of my life. As a give it forward project, I established Cover Letter Library in 2016 for which people who got the job to share their successful materials onwards to the generations after them. The community is now 700+ people strong. Members who then successfully get the job of their dream constantly give more materials back to the community.
Once I got the internship offer, I was also shared a number of finance technical books and a number of training courses log-in from my seniors. With such material, I am so well prepared that during my training weeks, I could focus my time mainly on networking which is absolutely the right thing to do (because the global analyst network is absolutely crucial for the start of your career). When it comes to the time to pass my FCA exam to legally start as an analyst, because I have access to this in advance, I pass with ease, when many of my peers only have 10 days to go through hundreds of hours of materials. According to exam statistics, one in 5 people fails these exams due to the stressful timeline. It strikes me that the prerequisite of this privileged access is that I was at LSE, and was blessed to be shared the training and technical books by the people who support me.
I also constantly check back with Cover Letter Library members 6 months to 1 year after they sign up to see where they are now, and if I can do anything more to help them. A large number of members have been asking me for this continuation of learning after they get the offers – the access to analyst training courses and books – for over a year now. So in mid-2018, I cleared everything in my calendar and sit down and start coding this site by myself. Here the story of Next Analyst begins.
There is a common thread among these stories that, having the right access is everything. If you come from an unknown school in rural areas, the chance of getting in could be low not because your education is bad, it’s because of the lack of access to the right people and information. If I was never given the right access throughout my life, I might now still be in a village in Vietnam.
Because having the right access has changed my life, I put in the work to build all these platforms to make it available to you too. I hope it will change someone else’s life, particularly yours. I believe if anyone wants to learn something, they should be able to learn it, which is a mission I will always have in mind since I was deprived of that chance to learn when I was young.
In addition, I also build a social platform for members to interact with each other, share ideas and knowledge and support each other through their job search, internships or the start of their career. This platform has been built on respects and was intended for a good cause. I trust that the people who enter this community are people of certain calibre who will act rationally. All interactions and forums are supposed to be self-moderated so so please do not abuse it and be nice and respectful to others members.
Why we need the donation
I spent hundreds of hours of my own time building this platform for you for free; however there are monthly costs in running it that are incredibly expensive; such as hosting terabytes of videos and books; ensuring uptime and that the site is always accessible to you without glitch; preventing security attack and keep your information safe; as well as filtering all spam and malicious parties. I can’t front all these money myself and the cost of enrolment is a one-off donation to cover the running costs. If you notice, the one-off fees are a novelty: it’s equivalent to 30 pence (£0.30) per hour of training, or 2 pence per book (£0.02). I’ve listed the Amazon price of the books on each download page, you will see most of these are worth £50-£100 each. For the courses, many other sites charge £300-£1,000 for each similar course (for example Wall Street Oasis).
To put this in perspective – the one-off fee is the same cost as buying me a meal in London as thanks. If this access could change your life, I hope it’s worth the cost of a meal?