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Mentorship April 30, 2020
ENTITY Academy taught me so much about business. Here are just three of the many things I've learned.
As a rising junior at Duke University undergoing recruiting for trading jobs with little to no real finance experience, I’ve felt everything from insecurity to fear that I won’t succeed as a woman in a male-dominated industry.
With soft and hard skills prep, ENTITY‘s Business Collective taught me lessons that’ll resonate with me for the rest of my professional career. Here are some important skills that I learned during my business mentorship program.
Finance can’t be reduced to simply crunching numbers. Cubicle work is becoming obsolete as analysts shift to client-based work. Hence, this movement emphasizes the importance of building strong and successful relationships with clients that extend beyond small talk.
To transition from a superficial relationship to a substantive one, you need to be an additive person. This means you need to add value and bring something to the table that others don’t already have. This can come in the form of expertise in a certain area, or giving someone a book recommendation.
As someone who will (hopefully) be managing expectations and negotiating with clients in a sales and trading position, I’m glad the Business Collective highlighted interpersonal skills at the forefront of the program.
In addition to seeking amicable individuals with good communication skills, financial institutions are looking to hire employees that understand analytics.
Working on Wall Street will require me to fill in and understand complex spreadsheets. I will also need to understand the different funding stages of a company (Crunchbase is a great resource for this!).
Thankfully, during our rotations at ENTITY’s Business Collective, I was able to study different corporation valuation models as they relate to successful businesses like Catapult Creamery.
We similarly analyzed the competitive analysis that they incorporated in their investor deck. Although I learned these hard skills inside the classroom, reviewing and asking seemingly stupid questions in a forgiving environment allowed me to delve deeper into the data.
Lastly, analytic abilities and extraversion are futile in finance without the ability to tackle difficult situations with ease. Whether it’s facilitating a merger or an acquisition for a client, companies look for candidates who can think laterally and find outside-the-box solutions to problems efficiently. A record of being able to solve these while keeping your cool is essential.
At ENTITY, the Business Collective staff taught us search engine optimization. Although this may seem completely irrelevant to finance, the process of optimizing an article to succeed in Google’s algorithm taught me to persist in the face of unfamiliarity. I’d often have to think of ways to circumvent Google’s system. One way was coming up with synonym keywords and creative headlines for articles.
Now that I have graduated from the ENTITY Business Collective, I’m excited to move forward in my career. I can see myself kick ass in financial services with the business mentorship I needed.
