Sasha, our previous president came back to visit during our 11.9 meeting. Welcome back, Sasha!
Sasha talked about her experience in Bryn Mawr. She was a Math major and was involved in OIG for all of her four years at Bryn Mawr. She talked about her internship experience in her sophomore year. It was an internship at the Law department of ACT. She worked as a credit analyst and sorted all the finance related news. As an intern, she also worked on projects with other interns and this helped all the interns get to know each other.
Sasha mentioned wishing that she had started making use of the CDO resources earlier. She also mentioned the importance of maintaining connections with alumnae and other contacts in companies you may wish to intern or work for.
Sasha has been working for Vanguard since her graduation from Bryn Mawr. She is now in her first-year rotation process. This year’s work mainly is aim to establish group work ethics, to think critically, to communicate with people and to be familiar with each department.
So far, her daily responsibilities include taking phone calls and answering clients’ questions. This routine job helps her know the products of Vanguard and get to know the company better.
Sasha then talks more about Vanguard. It is a mutual fund company. Vanguard also helps its clients process 401K forms, retirement plans and provides other financial services. She also mentioned some other famous mutual funds companies, such as Fidelity. Vanguard always keeps its expense lowest in the industry. Vanguard is conservative, but it has been devoted to recruit more female workers. In fact, we have a lot of Bryn Mawr alumnae working at Vanguard right now.
Sasha advices those want to have a job in finance industry to start their preparations early. To start talk to different people in finance and research online, and be prepared for behavioral interview questions, be able to elaborate on your resume and be updated about current events.
Another member asked about her experience in Bryn Mawr and how to have a wonderful resume during four years in Bryn Mawr. She didn’t give specific guidelines. Generally, sports are great. Any working experience, including working in dining can be transfer skills to be elaborated on resume. All the working experiences can help you learn to be delegate, and learn to talk to different people and become a good team worker. Sasha used her experience as an Ann Taylor salesperson to express her point. This job helped her to learn to get people buy Ann Taylor products and being friendly. Basically, any experiences can help in some ways and ore relevant experience gradually would be better. She mentioned that Vanguard took voluntary work into consideration. She talked about advantages of a Liberal Arts education as well. She also reminded us of the importance of our Honor Code. Ethical people are always valued in this industry. Overall, the most important thing is to be familiar with skills you learned and be confident so as to be able sell yourself during an interview.