Success Story: Student joins intensive finance program
Success Stories | Jul 05, 2016 | Gabelli School of Business
For four weeks this summer, 30 college-age women learned from some of the finest academic and professional minds in finance.
A Gabelli School student was among them.
Rachel Clivaz, BS ’18, was selected for the inaugural class of Girls Who Invest, a nonprofit seeking to groom women to become the next leaders in asset management.
Launched in 2015, the organization aims to have 30 percent of all investable capital managed by women within the next 15 years.
Girls Who Invest was founded by Seema R. Hingorani, the former chief investment officer for the New York City Retirement System. The program consists of four weeks of classes held at the University of Pennsylvania, which just concluded, followed by a six-week paid internship for each student.
“I loved it. It was really intense,” said Clivaz, a business administration major. “Every lunch, Monday through Friday, we would have people – CEOs and senior vice presidents from different companies – come in and talk to us, and we got to ask them questions. That was amazing.”
Getting into the program was highly competitive, Clivaz said. She had to write essays, answer numerous questions and produce a one-minute video. More than 100 qualified candidates were identified, a pool that was winnowed down to the 30 who participated.
“I definitely made some lifelong connections,” Clivaz said. “These are all brilliant women, and they were so much fun to hang out with, too.”
Clivaz, who heard about the program through her membership in Fordham’s Smart Woman Securities chapter, will work as an intern with Bowdoin College’s endowment fund. She will spend a week at the college in Maine and the next five weeks at a satellite office in New York.
“I told them that I wanted to work [in] nonprofit with finance, and they were able to find this nonprofit position, so that was really wonderful,” she said.