Hi Rhea! Thank you for taking time to speak with Investment Society today. Could you please tell us a little bit about yourself?
My name is Rhea. I graduated in 2020 and was an international student from New Delhi, India. I now live in New York City and am an Investment Banking Analyst at Bank of America, Merrill Lynch. While at Wellesley, I majored in Econ, and initially had close to no idea of what I wanted to do post graduation. I kind of fell into finance and I can walk you through that more later. For my freshman summer, I interned in a small private equity company called LCR Capital. Then sophomore year, I decided to do something most fun and I interned at this company called Venture for America (VFA). VFA has a similar model to Teach for America but instead places fellows in small startups in economically stagnant cities in the US. And then finally, junior summer I got lucky and interned with the Healthcare Investment Banking group at BofA and decided to come back to the group full-time post-graduation.
How is your experience at Bank of America as an analyst? What is the firm culture like?
I started my job in June 2020 and because Bank of America is still virtual, I have been working from home since then. In that sense, I think my experience has been very nontraditional, however I am enjoying what I do and am learning a lot! For one, as an Analyst in the Healthcare group, I have entered the industry at a time when it is seeing not only very high activity in terms of deal flow, but also is going through structural changes in the way consumers, providers, and investors think about the current healthcare system and the pipeline of innovation within it. Secondly, large multi-national banks, such as Bank of America, are able to provide a very strong training ground for junior bankers through international transactional experience, broad product exposure, a larger and more sophisticated client base, job mobility, and high transactional volume. All of these hold great value to me and I would encourage current students to think about when deciding where to start your career. Lastly, Wall Street is known to have a tough culture, and like almost all banks, I have found that people at BofA are also extremely hardworking, very communicative and seemingly “always on”. I have found that in my group, there is a lot of emphasis put on learning and self-growth, both of which I value a lot and seem to make my experience very positive.
I saw that you did research at MIT during your time at Wellesley. Could you elaborate on what type of research you did and how you got started with research?
I actually started research sophomore year. I think it was sophomore fall, so pretty early on compared to most people at Wellesley. I started working with this professor called Zen Chu, who is a professor at the Sloan School, so technically my research fell under the Sloan School. Initially worked with a group called Hacking Medicine, but over time moved focus towards my own research paper with two PhD students under Prof Chu. The research paper was on how grass-roots entrepreneurship complements the traditional top-down innovation in medicine. We compared lung cancer and breast cancer in terms of incidence and mortality, as well as institutional, government, and private sector funding towards the research and development for these diseases.
Do you use any concepts or skills that you learned from Wellesley at work? How has a liberal arts education benefited you?
That's a good question and I think about this a lot! First off, I think having a liberal arts background will play an instrumental role in your post-graduation career, no matter what field you go into. A lot of his has to do with the softer skills and the confidence that I developed at Wellesley. In addition to this, my educational background trained me to think about concepts not just analytically and from a numbers standpoint, but also zoom out and think about external factors and strategic incentives that could guide management and businesses. For example, an interest in politics or social sciences can help an Analyst think about additional risks a company may face or may help in providing advice on geographic expansion of a business.
When and how did you know you wanted to pursue something within finance?
I think my path into finance is pretty nontraditional compared to many others. Didn’t come into Wellesley knowing I wanted to be an Investment Banker and kind of fell into it. I joined WWIB, ISOC, SWS, and other similar clubs on campus with the idea to learn about different career paths. I was motivated to recruit for a job in the financial services when I met alumns who came back to campus to talk about their jobs – they all seemed to be these really driven and confident leaders in the industry and a part of me began to aspire to be like that. Over my freshman and sophomore year, I met so many such alumns and kept in touch with them and found the work they do very interesting. After taking a variety of classes by freshman and sophomore year, I felt drawn towards the analytical yet highly applicable nature of Economics / Finance and started exploring the “traditional” career paths that some of the upper-class women who were studying the same subjects had taken. When I decided I wanted to pursue a career in financial services, Investment Banking seemed like a route given the advisory nature of the business, coupled with the transactional nature of the business.
Comments