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"financial services fellowship"
Financial Services Fellowship, 2015: Rik Ghosh
"The Financial Services Fellowship is a prestigious award that gives students who are interested in financial services a hands-on experience through an intensive trip to New York City during spring break. Students will meet with people representing a wide range of roles in this industry, including journalists, sales and trading analysts, investment professionals, hedge fund managers, financial analysts and more. All expenses are paid through the generosity of a Reed trustee"
Since coming to Reed, I’ve mostly just spent my fall and spring breaks going home and relaxing after an often-stressful half semester. Though such a week of downtime is always appreciated, this past spring break was completely different. Every day of the Financial Services Fellowship (FSF) was jam-packed with activities: days that usually started with firm visits before nine am often ended with social and networking events that ran well past nine pm. The trip packed many experiences into a short period of time, and it was undoubtedly a very productive way to spend the week.
Even before the actual spring break trip, there were a few events on campus that the fellows were asked to attend: the first of these was a three-part Paideia course on capital markets and general financial terminology. This is particularly important because it implies that prior knowledge of the financial industry is not necessary to apply — in fact the trip as a whole is in some form simply an introduction to the professional working world. Though I had absolutely no experience with Finance prior to the trip (and only minimal experience with economics), as a result of the Paideia course I did not have any trouble following the presentations of the various firms in New York.
Continue reading Financial Services Fellowship, 2015: Rik Ghosh
Financial Services Fellowship, 2015: Morgan Vague
"The Financial Services Fellowship is a prestigious award that gives students who are interested in financial services a hands-on experience through an intensive trip to New York City during spring break. Students will meet with people representing a wide range of roles in this industry, including journalists, sales and trading analysts, investment professionals, hedge fund managers, financial analysts and more. All expenses are paid through the generosity of a Reed trustee"
Read on to learn about the experience of Morgan Vague, a science major in the world of finance.
This March, a group of eight Reedies including myself, received the opportunity to travel to the mecca of finance, the big apple itself: New York City. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous during the first night, when our generous trip leader initiated an open questions and answer session about finance over a steak dinner in an iconic New York restaurant. Finance had always interested me, and I could hold a decent conversation about it. But, as the only science major among a group dominated by economics majors, I felt a little out of place. When it was my turn to ask a question, I inhaled deeply, and spouted off a fairly basic question that was answered without the slightest trace of condescension. This set the tone for the next 4 days.
Continue reading Financial Services Fellowship, 2015: Morgan Vague
Financial Services Fellowship, 2015: Meagan Keating
"The Financial Services Fellowship is a prestigious award that gives students who are interested in financial services a hands-on experience through an intensive trip to New York City during spring break. Students will meet with people representing a wide range of roles in this industry, including journalists, sales and trading analysts, investment professionals, hedge fund managers, financial analysts and more. All expenses are paid through the generosity of a Reed trustee"
As a sophomore wavering between Political Science and Economics, I applied for the Financial Services Fellowship because I was fascinated with the relationship between capitalism, markets, and economic policy. In this sense, I embarked on the trip hungry for information and knowledge about the financial world that would help me understand it as a system of parts comprising a whole. However, after four days of visiting all sorts of different financial firms and with a few weeks of retrospection, I think I now understand it better as a series of dynamic parts that are constantly shifting and evolving as the world advances. While it certainly didn’t answer all of my questions about capitalism and wealth distribution, I now have a better sense of how individuals on trading floors actually interact with complex financial instruments that are used to mitigate risk and manipulate markets in some seriously fascinating ways.
Beyond my academic reflections with the fellowship, the trip was perhaps most useful in the professional career experience it provided. Every night in New York City involved meeting with professionals in finance (especially Reed alumni in finance!) in formal settings at various highend restaurants. At times interacting with strangers was easier and more interesting than others, and I was able to talk to several Reed alumni who had transitioned from finance to law in their careers and who were excited to talk to me about both professions. While “networking” never really became enjoyable per say, I certainly came away from the trip feeling more prepared to handle future career situations.
Overall, the trip was a fantastic learning experience, perhaps most so in learning how to navigate the foreign world of professional careers and life in NYC. Among the most surprising things I learned were: 1) Despite usually preferring quieter and smaller towns and cities, I actually really enjoyed the pace and feel of NYC 2) I connected with several great students on the trip who I had never had a chance to get to know at Reed 3) Business suits are surprisingly comfortable and it took a very short time for me to feel normal wearing one every day.
I would highly recommend applying for this trip even if you are not set on a career finance, as professional career experience off campus is an invaluable asset to exploring careers after Reed.
Continue reading Financial Services Fellowship, 2015: Meagan Keating
Financial Services Fellowship, 2015: Sophie Bucci
"The Financial Services Fellowship is a prestigious award that gives students who are interested in financial services a hands-on experience through an intensive trip to New York City during spring break. Students will meet with people representing a wide range of roles in this industry, including journalists, sales and trading analysts, investment professionals, hedge fund managers, financial analysts and more. All expenses are paid through the generosity of a Reed trustee"
As the name of the Financial Services Fellowship would imply, fellows’ spring break in New York was centered around career opportunities in finance: We visited salespeople, investment bankers, consultants, research analysts, quantitative financers, portfolio managers, relationship managers, risk managers, newspeople, technologists, and operations professionals in their native environments at major investment banks, hedge funds, economic and investment consulting firms, a financial press, and a private equity fund. Before and during the trip, fellows were also given the opportunity to learn about net present value calculations, bonds, derivatives, regulation, income statements, and asset-backed securities.
More than this, however, the trip offered a broader introduction into the world of work and life beyond Reed. As the rare Reedie who actively looks forward to working in an office this summer and after graduation, it was refreshing to me to wake up early each morning, put on a suit, and experience an 8 am to 10 pm day full of business meetings and smart people getting things done in one of the greatest cities in the world. More than any specific pieces of knowledge, like the difference between debt and a loan and or the factors contributing to the lack of a robust secondary market for private equity buyins, I’ll remember my positive impressions of general professional life and its wealth of possibilities. Within the finance industry alone, there are far more roles than I had originally anticipated, and enough products, methods, and jargon to satisfy a Reedie’s intellectual curiosity for quite some time.
Continue reading Financial Services Fellowship, 2015: Sophie Bucci
Financial Services Fellowship, 2015: Sarah Canavan
"The Financial Services Fellowship is a prestigious award that gives students who are interested in financial services a hands-on experience through an intensive trip to New York City during spring break. Students will meet with people representing a wide range of roles in this industry, including journalists, sales and trading analysts, investment professionals, hedge fund managers, financial analysts and more. All expenses are paid through the generosity of a Reed trustee."
Read on for an account of Sarah Canavan's FSF 2015 experience.
When I applied for the Financial Services Fellowship I only had faint ideas of what happened in the finance industry. I think we had just started covering monetary policy in Kim Clausing’s Intro to Economics class, and my visions of Wall Street had mostly been colored by The Wolf of Wall Street, “occupy” protests and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. What I knew, was that if Reed was offering an opportunity to fill in the gaps between where my interests already lie (federal policy and budgets, research funding, et al.) and what the heck happens in big banks and financial institutions, I wanted to be a part of it.
Continue reading Financial Services Fellowship, 2015: Sarah Canavan
Financial Services Fellowship, 2015: Dean Young, Ahyan Panjwani, Zach Harding-Laprade
“The Financial Services Fellowship is a prestigious award that gives students who are interested in financial services a hands-on experience through an intensive trip to New York City during spring break. Students will meet with people representing a wide range of roles in this industry, including journalists, sales and trading analysts, investment professionals, hedge fund managers, financial analysts and more. All expenses are paid through the generosity of a Reed trustee”
Read on to learn of the experiences of a few of the Financial Services Fellows of 2015
Continue reading Financial Services Fellowship, 2015: Dean Young, Ahyan Panjwani, Zach Harding-Laprade
Financial Services Fellows, Sarah Brauner
As many of my fellow Financial Services Fellows have blogged, this spring break, a group of Reed students (myself included), traveled to a very far and foreign land, where people wear nice suits, and eat steak, and talk about mortgage backed securities, and follow sports: Wall St. Before the trip, I literally could not fathom what went on at this mythical place whose name alone probably induces shudders among at least 50 percent of the student body. Assuming that my ignorance is the rule rather than the exception, I thought I’d spend this blog post illuminating a bit of the world inhabited by some of the most powerful people in the world. What follows is a brief selection of some of my experiences on Wall St; I’ll let you all cast your own judgment (or go on the trip next year to see it in the flesh!)
During Spring Break, I…
Obviously, this list does not encompass even a fraction of Wall St., or my brief time there. The purpose is more about giving a taste, and maybe piquing the interest, of students to partake in this Reed-sponsored journey to what might not actually be the dark side.
Continue reading Financial Services Fellows, Sarah Brauner