In November 2007, early in my senior year at Wooster, I received an offer to join Bear Stearns after graduation. In March, just as I was putting the finishing touches on my IS thesis in Business Economics, Bear Stearns collapsed. I had spent two summers interning at Bear, working my way to an offer, and suddenly it was gone. I was lucky enough to regroup and secure an offer at JP Morgan, but the experience taught me a lesson about the importance of being mentally agile and ready to pivot. Fortunately, I had the experience of my Wooster education to help me move into new domains, in this moment and in many others throughout my career.
Reflecting on my time at Wooster, my economics classes are one of several standout memories, but the breadth of a Wooster education is evident in the other key experiences that stay with me – the Jenny Investment Club, the campus club I joined, the track team. These experiences trained me to think critically, reinforced a passion that became a key part of my career, and introduced me to lifelong friends. This breadth showed up again in my IS thesis, an exploration of an interdisciplinary topic called behavioral finance that combines psychology and economics. Wooster did not have a course dedicated to behavioral finance, so I used my thesis experience to learn as much as I could on the topic and conduct a rigorous analysis of one of its core findings, the “overreaction effect.” The work of creating and defending a thesis in a novel area of study forced persistence out of me in a way that has been critically useful to my career.
When I arrived at my post-grad training program at JP Morgan, I was well-prepared. Wooster had given me a broad and interdisciplinary education, one focused as much on how to learn as on what to learn. It also helped that I had been through the rigor of the business economics program at Wooster – there’s no such thing as turning in B-level work in the real world, and the challenges of the department prepared me well for that mindset.
When I graduated and joined JP Morgan, I spent 6 years trading all types of assets, from equity and corporate bonds to currency and interest rate swaps. After those 6 years, I decided to take a break and travel, an opportunity for self-reflection that led me into the start-up world and then into consulting, where I joined Boston Consulting Group (BCG). At BCG, again, my critical thinking skills and ability to make a quantitative argument, nurtured at Wooster and enhanced by practical finance experience, differentiated me from peers and helped me make Partner.
I am in a new industry again now, working at Advent, a large private equity firm, to deploy Artificial Intelligence into their portfolio companies. It’s an exciting field, full of new advancements that require new learning, and critical thinking is once again proving invaluable. As I look ahead, I am confident that Wooster’s focus on teaching how to learn will serve me well in this new chapter of my career, and in whatever others may come.