She quit Morgan Stanley after 4 months. Now she sells clothes

Sofia Jiang graduated Georgetown last year and took an investment banking analyst job at Morgan Stanley. She quit after four months.

"It became super clear to me that this wasn't the place where I'd learn how to run a business, which is ultimately what I wanted to do," Jiang said. She now works in marketing at a fashion tech startup and is building her own clothing brand, SofSet, on the side. Her base salary was $110,000 at Morgan Stanley. Today she makes far less. She said she is investing in a future that will "pay off in years."

Jiang's path out started before she left. During her summer internship at the bank she struggled to find work clothes she liked that were affordable and didn't require dry cleaning. That frustration seeded the idea for SofSet. She began designing the brand and marketing it on TikTok while still employed at the firm.

She posted Day in My Life videos from Georgetown and later from Morgan Stanley. The content took off, building a following of more than 30,000 followers.

"I knew that if I was going to have this consumer brand one day, the hardest thing is getting people to know about it," Jiang said. "So I started posting content I thought my future customers would want to see."

The decision to leave came with guilt. "I knew that if I stayed longer, I'd be more afraid because I would have sacrificed two years of my life," she said. She asked a few friends for advice, then concluded it was "my story, my life, and everyone has a different career path."

Around the time she decided to leave, a founder friend offered her a marketing and content position at his small VC-backed startup. She started the next week. The role lasted three to four months. She called it a chance to get hands-on experience on a small team, then set her sights on fashion tech.

Jiang cold-emailed everyone she could find at fashion tech companies: employees, CEOs, recruiters, and investors who had just raised rounds. She kept each outreach message short, explained her background in one or two sentences, and added how she could provide value. One connection led to HR at a VC fund focused on fashion tech. That person connected her to the CEO of her current employer.

"A year ago, I had the same idea of what I wanted my life to look like," she said. "Then, when I looked at the people who were my bosses in investment banking, who were going to be me 20 years out, I didn't want the life they had."

Jiang now works full time in marketing at a fashion tech startup and builds her own brand on the side.