CBA showcases young alumni

Amanda O’Brien, who majored in finance and insurance and graduated in 2008, is currently a private wealth manager at Goldman Sachs. Ryan said she deals mainly with entrepreneurs, and the minimum wealth for a client is $10 million in liquid assets.

“One of the first things I learned was dealing was different personalities,” she said. “Some people like really direct communication, while others just want to hear how fabulous they are.”

Ryan said she prefers direct communication, but her team works very quietly, predominantly through e-mail. 

“It can be very difficult to communicate about problems in e-mail fashion,” she said. “You learn to adjust, and you learn how to do it really quickly.”

Another obstacle O’Brien said she faced was learning how to brag about herself. She said that at Goldman Sachs it is all about self-promotion, which is common for newcomers in her position. 

“I think what most first-time analysts do is they’re too humble about what they’ve accomplished over the year,” she said. 

Through this, she said she learned about self-promotion and how to get to know coworkers. She collected recyclables from office mates, becoming known as “the recycling queen in the office,” which helped her get to know others.

“When you start out it’s easy to be quiet and just do your job really well, and pray to God someone notices you, but it’s not really the best way to go about it,” she said. 

The second speaker, Matthew Eaton, graduated in 2009 with a degree in accounting. He now works at Velocity Financial Group in analytical and profile management support, and is coming up on his three-month review, he said.

“As a freshman I really didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I’d say today I still don’t know exactly what I want to do, but I have something in mind,” he said. 

Eaton went through a unique experience for his first co-op:  Two weeks after beginning, the position was removed, he said.

“Once my co-op job got taken away, I put in my application to Wake Forest and [Boston College] and was like ‘I’m out of this school’,” he said. 

However, Eaton said he quickly found another co-op, then did a second in San Francisco, and his third with the company he is at now, Velocity Financial Group.

“As a co-op, being able to understand what it takes to go out there and know what you want to do and how to make that happen and not just sit and be okay with doing the grunt work all the time,” he said. “Knowing there is something beyond what you are doing ... really helped.” 

Jayna Cantor, a 2009 finance and insurance major, said she had a similar co-op experience to Eaton’s, starting off at a large company, MFS Investment Management, but doing her last two co-ops at GMO, a small but global investment management firm. 

“At MFS I didn’t find it was the kind of environment I thought I could flourish in,” she said. 

Canter’s last co-op with GMO was at the company’s Australia office in New South Wales, which she found through connections she established with them during her second co-op. She said she loved the experience, which led her to be the go-to person for anything having to do with the Australian branch.

Lyle Stevens, a 2009 entrepreneurship and new venture major who is now an information technology project manager for Raytheon Company, focused on the top five things he had learned including his personality type, building a large network of professional contacts, and finding a mentor. 

Stevens said another large part was getting involved on campus with whatever most closely aligned with his interests. He said freshman year he was all over the place, but sophomore year decided to focus on being in the Kappa Sigma fraternity, where he ultimately became president. 

“I decided that being in a fraternity was as close as I would ever get to running a small business while in school,” he said.

The final panelist, Peter Lebrun, a 2008 graduate with a degree in finance and a finance manager at Axia, a business managementconsulting firm based in Bostonin , had a different perspective since he was not involved on-campus activities. 

“I graduated and realized I had wasted a very valuable resource,” he said. 

Lebron completed three co-ops at various companies and landed a job at Axia after graduation, he said. After his first co-op working with taxes and accounting he changed his major to finance and insurance, leading him to his current job at Axia, though he said he is still not sure he is satisfied with his position. 

“I kinda just took the first job I could, and it wasn’t as great as I hoped it would be to be honest with you,” Lebron said. 

Students in attendance said they learned from the panel discussion. 

“[I learned to] definitely to be prepared and know what my goals, and know what I need to do to reach them,” freshman finance major Jackie Wallace said.