Paying It Forward: From University Endowment Office to Wall Street
When the University Endowment Office (now University Investment Office) formed in July 2016, one of its goals was to implement an internship program exclusively for Rutgers University students. The framework was simple and sought to
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provide students with an opportunity to access and learn about institutional investing and various investment strategies;
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accommodate students with a passion for learning and investing; and
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allow them to grow and contribute as team members by encouraging successful interns to work with the team until they graduate.
By providing longer-term internships, the Investment Office grants students the ability to understand the nuances of the industry and our process without feeling the time-induced pressure of a shorter-term internship. In time, this provides the Investment Office with a valuable resource—highly knowledgeable team members with the wherewithal to take on difficult projects and tasks.
The department’s first intern, Misha Nehring (Class of 2018), began in January 2017 after she and the office formed a relationship with the university's Road to Wall Street (RTWS) program. Initially, RTWS was a donor-funded program designed to boost students’ industry knowledge and interview skills. RTWS prepared Rutgers students for jobs on Wall Street while enhancing the university’s reputation as a target school. In the nine years since the program started, it has done just that. The majority of the department’s interns and potential candidates come from the RTWS program and from its sister organization, the student-run Little Investment Bankers of Rutgers Club (LIBOR). Nehring is now an Investment Banking Analyst in the Global Technology Group at Citi and continues to mentor current Rutgers students.
Since the inception of its internship program, the department has employed nine interns and will have six on staff during the fall 2019 semester, representing the largest cohort to date. The team will consist of two seniors, three juniors, and one sophomore. Diversifying by class year fosters a mentorship approach among interns, continuity, and institutional memory, and also allows veteran interns to identify new candidates each year. Additionally, it fosters a two-way audition during which students decide if investment management is a career path that they are interested in as to the Investment Office determines candidate quality. This typically happens each summer when more senior students leave for internships on Wall Street or elsewhere (which is encouraged as an important resume builder).
Interns take on everything from the mundane tasks of saving documents and entering investment-related information into a database to meeting with investment managers, performing research and analysis on investment opportunities, and writing memos for our investment committee. The team tries to make the internship worthwhile for both the interna and the team. As part of this aim, at least once a year, the team facilitates a visit for interns with an industry partner or a firm that has a close relationship with the university. This year, the team visited with Edison Partners, a private equity firm located in Princeton, New Jersey that focuses on small, quickly growing companies. Interns spent the day with junior and senior team members to get a better grasp of what each of their jobs entails, hear about their backgrounds and how they got there, and learn about the industry. Additionally, the group walked through a few possible investments, reviewed and built financial models, and listened in to an initial phone call with a possible investment target. Bringing to life things interns only read about becomes a definite advantage as they move forward.
As the program endures, the Investment Office hopes to continue to bring together students who are not only passionate about investing, but also diverse in perspective, thought, and educational focus, in a reflection of Rutgers’ student body. To date, program participants have included we’ve had four Honors College students, a Rutgers Future Scholar, and students with majors from finance to engineering to computer science. Although the Investment Office feels the program has been a success thus far, it believes there is much more to accomplish. It will strive to continuously find ways to get better and improve outcomes for its student interns and is guided by its long-term ambition to create a reputation for producing qualified interns and potential industry employees. It is the Investment Office’s aspiration for those students to look back on their experience at Rutgers as a positive one and the office will continue to do what it can to pay it forward for the next generation.