Finance major Career options

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I launched my own location-independent business in May of 2013, and I am now unemployable. Don't get me wrong, I've never received more job offers than I have in the past year, but I love working for myself so much that I can never put on a suit, wake up at 6:30 a.m. and commute 30 minutes to an office job ever again.

My life didn't always look this way. And my college degree was definitely not on a clear path to entrepreneurship as a financial planner. I was a theater and choir kid all through high school. (If "Glee" would have been around then, I would have been so cool. But "Glee" was not around, and I was not cool.) In college, I double-majored in theater performance and women's studies.

Today I'm a financial planner for millennials, and I work virtually with clients in their 20s and 30s across the country. When I first started taking my certified financial planner classes, I was so embarrassed to tell people my majors. But my past experience in theater, women's studies and therapy set me apart from all the other financial planners in the world.

How My College Majors Helped My Current Career

The experience, skills and abilities I gained in college all come into play every day in my current career. Any degree can help you develop your career into what you want. Don't lament the degree you earned or feel embarrassed over what your major was. Your college major doesn't matter as much as you think. Managers want to work with people who have great personalities and are easy to train.

So how do you make a big transition - like going from an actor to a financial planner - work for you? Start by understanding what you can do with the skills you have right now. What abilities do you have that are needed on your dream job? I never thought I'd be asked to be on the local news to speak about first-time home buying tips, but you better believe I was glad that four years of theater training prepared me for a three-minute segment.

Dig through your own experience and identify what you had to do to earn that degree you now feel can be used to develop your career. I use my writing skills - which I honed in my women's studies classes - to communicate with my clients via email, create financial articles for DailyFinance and send out my Gen Y Planning newsletter. In one of my early jobs in financial planning, I edited all of the other advisers' quarterly newsletters. This was a valuable skill that I brought to the company.