What a Psychology Degree Taught Me About Finance
May 4, 2026
I did not study finance in college. I studied people.
That distinction felt like a liability for a long time. When I graduated with a degree in psychology, I had a working understanding of cognitive bias, behavioral patterns, and what motivates human decision-making. But I could not read a balance sheet. I did not know what a cap table was. I had never heard the term “burn rate” in a sentence.
What I had was curiosity, a tolerance for complexity, and an instinct for understanding why people do what they do. I just had no idea yet how useful that would turn out to be.
Choosing to move into finance after graduation was not glamorous. It meant studying for the CFA Level One exam for hours each day for 6+ months, teaching myself the foundations of economics, derivatives, fixed income, financial analysis, portfolio management, etc.
The CFA curriculum does not care about your background. It expects you to show up ready, and the gap between where I started and where the exam needed me to be was, to put it plainly, significant.
But I passed.
And the experience of building that knowledge from scratch, without the comfort of “I studied this in school,” taught me something that matters more than the credential itself: the willingness to sit inside a subject you do not understand yet, and stay there long enough to make sense of it. That skill, more than any formula I memorized, is what I reach for most.
I joined FinStrat Management as part of the Founder Solutions team. FSM is an outsourced CFO firm embedded in the financial operations of venture-backed startups, and I came on at a moment when the company was simultaneously launching a venture fund. So from the beginning, I was not just learning finance in a classroom sense. I was watching it happen in real time, on both sides of the table.
What I did not expect was how quickly the job would become less about numbers and more about people.
I started meeting founders at pitch competitions, accelerator events, university programs, and industry conferences. Investors, advisors, placement agents, general partners, family offices. People who had spent decades mastering their domains. People who had built things, sold things, failed at things, and built
again. At 22, I was almost always the youngest person in the room. Sometimes by a little. Often by a lot.
When you enter rooms like these without the armor of a long resume, you develop a different kind of attention. You listen more than you speak. And after enough of those rooms, patterns start to emerge.
The sharpest people I know ask the questions everyone else is thinking but won’t say out loud. They don’t perform competence; they exercise it, and the gap between those two things is wider than it looks. Performed competence fills the silence. Real competence knows which silence is worth keeping.
I also noticed how much professional success, across every industry and every role, runs on relationship infrastructure. Not networking on the surface, but the slow accumulation of trust with specific people over time. The investors I have watched operate most effectively are not the ones making the most noise.
Founders carry a particular kind of pressure that I had underestimated before I started working around them. The ones who build durable companies are not necessarily the most visionary or the most charismatic. They are often the most disciplined, especially in the moments when discipline feels completely counter to what the situation seems to demand.
Sitting across from someone who has been working in finance since before I was born and explaining their specific craft is an exercise in managing your own psychology while trying to understand theirs. There are moments where imposter syndrome is not a concept from a LinkedIn post. It is a physical experience.
What I have found, over and over, is that most people respond well to honesty about where you are. Not oversharing, not performing humility as deflection, but being direct about what you know, what you are still learning, and what you bring that someone else might not. People who are far along in their careers have usually earned the ability to spot the difference.
Looking back, the transition from psychology to finance was never truly a pivot. Finance is a discipline rooted in human behavior under conditions of uncertainty. Every investment thesis is a bet on how people will act. Every financial model is a narrative about what a team believes will happen, expressed in numbers. Every founder-investor relationship is a negotiation between two parties with asymmetric information, different incentives, and varying tolerances for ambiguity.
The ability to sit across from someone and understand not just what they are saying but how they are reasoning has proven more applicable to this work than I initially anticipated. The CFA provided the technical foundation. The psychology degree provided the lens.
Gabrielle Marquez is the Founder Solutions Lead at FinStrat Management.
