by Lucy Palin, MiF Admissions Manager
In February 2019, the Career Centre’s Masters in Finance (MiF) Team held the very first MiF Career Day. The day was designed for MiF students looking to make a career move into a different sector by developing career skills, exploring different career pathways and connecting with alumni to learn from their stories and to gather industry insights.
Developing personal presence and impact
The Career Day began with a powerful coaching session on developing personal presence and impact. Vivia Tan (MiF Full-time student) explained that in this session, “Using scientific methods, the coach helped us identify the differences between sounds generated from different parts of body and how they are perceived by audiences. We also learned how our personal presence should be, especially in an interview context.”
Specialised workshops
This was followed by a series of workshops covering key areas for career development with a focus on specific finance industries. Whether students wanted to engage in investment pitch practice or practice answering competency and behavioural questions for upcoming interviews, they were able to select career workshops that addressed their particular needs.
Vivia Tan and Nitin Kewalramani reflected on the day and they have shared how they selected which career workshops to attend and what they learnt from them:
“My goal is to move into the asset management industry as a Portfolio Manager / Fixed Income Research. I chose the Mock Interview session to get feedback on my answers to questions I would be asked in a real life scenario from an asset management division.” – Nitin Kewalramani, MiF Part-time student
“In the afternoon, I was lucky enough to attend a 1-to-1 investment pitch exercise session, which is what I like most as I am focusing on asset management career and would like to become an equity analyst in the future. We submitted our investment sample three days in advance for the coach, who is an experienced equity analyst, to review. Within this half-hour session, I pitched the stock to the coach and received personalized feedback on my pitching. He highlighted what points in my pitch were valid and which ones needed to be dug deeper as well as which ones I should have considered in my pitch. It was real valuation advice that will help with my pitching!” – Vivia Tan, MiF Full-time student
Hearing from alumni
In the afternoon following the self-selective career workshops, Jessie Zhu, Career Lead for MiF, hosted an Alumni panel discussion on tackling the direct hiring market. This was a great way for students to hear first-hand experiences from alum (one from PwC, one from Zeb Consulting and one from Credit Suisse Wealth Management) on the process to secure their roles and how to bounce back from ‘rejections’ and reframing them as a learning experience to find the right role.
The day ended with round table Alumni/Student networking and drinks. This allowed students to connect with MiF Alumni working in their sectors of interest and learn from their insights to inform their career choices and action plans.
Nitin and Vivia shared their experience of the power of hearing directly from alumni at the panel event and evening networking event:
“In the networking event I got some great advice from James, working for Petrus Financial, in the asset management industry. I also enjoyed networking with Manan from PwC who gave us a talk about what it is like working in Consulting / Strategy, which is also one of the areas I would like to learn about in the initial months of the MiF while I am discovering myself and getting to know more about what I enjoy. I look forward to this journey and events like the MiF Career Day are having a great positive impact on my thought process.” – Nitin Kewalramani, MiF Part-time student
“Following the pitching session, I joined the ‘Tackling Direct Hiring Market’ session. This session aimed to help us understand how we can approach unstructured recruiting and the different ways to search for a job opportunity beyond the school career website. Real past students’ examples and statistics were given to inspire us to think about our own creative ways to tackle direct hiring markets. This session helped me re-build confidence for my job searching and think about other job searching approaches!
Later, we had an exciting networking evening with MiF alumni from different areas – Asset Management, Private Wealth Management, Corporate/Treasury, Credit/Risk Management, Infrastructure/Development Finance, Financial Consultancy/Advisory, Investment Banking and Private Equity. We had two rounds of round-table discussion with alumni sitting at our tables followed by open networking. It was excellent to meet and discuss with so many alumni within one event. All of them were friendly and willing to share their insights, experiences and advice. Lastly, but importantly, the food and drinks are great which are the highlights for this Friday night too!” – Vivia Tan, MiF Full-time student
This Career Day is a mere fraction of what the LBS Career Centre offers students. It is part of a vast array of ongoing activities and support that they provide to our MiF students throughout their journey at LBS.
Interested in joining the next MiF class? Submit a CV to discuss your eligibility with our Recruitment team or get in touch with them directly.