Manhattan is about to get some rain, and Thi Kieu “Na” Huynh ’28 is high up enough to be one of the first to know.
Huynh, a finance major from Vietnam, is one of 10 Trinity University business students perched in a 40th-floor room at JPMorgan headquarters, peering through the storm clouds at the high-powered world of finance. During this three-day visit, Huynh and her classmates are making the rounds at similar big firms such as Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Citi, Nomura, and more, networking in skyscrapers across New York City to feel out potential careers.
The trip is supported by a donation from Jeff ‘98 and Reka Osborne ‘97, who have whisked the students into a hotel in midtown Manhattan for three days of non-stop site visits to these major firms. Leading the team into each site are Dean Raquel Alexander, Ph.D., and Associate Dean Shage Zhang, Ph.D., of Trinity’s Neidorff School of Business, who are aiming to build on Trinity’s tight-knit alumni network in finance.
“Finance has a reputation as a field where you ‘need to know someone’ to get a leg up,” Zhang says.
Evening the Odds
Landing an internship in finance, a field dominated by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Citi, and BlackRock, can be harder than getting into the Ivies. Take 2024, when 493,000 applicants competed for about 4,000 spots at JPMorgan, according to a company presentation to investors. To stand out from this crowd, Huynh and her classmates will need more than technical skills or luck.
“I need a chance to connect, face to face, with people in each firm,” Huynh says.
Alexander says finance students like Huynh each need an undergraduate internship, usually completed the summer after junior year, to even have a chance of landing a career in the field. These grueling positions, many of which may carry 80+ hour weeks and demand rapidly shifting skill sets, can turn into full-time offers if students perform well. While Huynh, a junior, has already accepted one such internship for Boston Consulting Group, sophomores such as Jayden Kimani ’29 and Jack Reese ’29 are still open to new opportunities.
Kimani hails from Nairobi, Kenya, but went to high school in Georgia, where he first fell in love with finance while bookkeeping for his aunt’s massage shop in the state. A double major in finance and business analytics, Kimani says the NYC trip has him fired up about the future.
“There's no job like investment banking. You can be a straight-out-of-college 22-year-old, and get to be on calls with a Fortune 500 CEO,” Kimani says. “Companies go to banks in their most important times, like in mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings (IPOs), and that’s when I’ll be able to listen and learn how these people operate."
Reese, a finance and accounting double major from Annapolis, Maryland, is no stranger to grueling conditions. The summer after his first year at Trinity, he worked a consulting internship in Baltimore while continuing his own boat detailing business as well as scrubbing boats at a yacht company in his off-hours.
For Reese, New York is a place to get answers you can’t find in a textbook. “This is the top of the mountain,” he says. “It’s easy to ask questions in a classroom, and it’s hard to ask questions to professionals. I think it's even harder to ask questions to the people who are on the top of Wall Street. Getting this kind of experience is what makes this trip so valuable.”
Linked Together
Trinity’s burgeoning network of finance alumni helps these students' prospects trend upwards. Staff in Trinity’s Center for Experiential Learning and Career Success, including Maranda Larsen, director of employer and community relations, and Jennifer Rames ’03, assistant director for internships and course projects, worked with the Neidorff contingent to sift through alumni and professional connections to ensure that each site visit has a Trinity connection.
The group meets Nathan Coelen ’02, a former math major at Trinity who’s worked his way up as co-head of fixed income strategies and fixed income electronic trading at Morgan Stanley. He sits just feet from a bustling trading floor, dispensing wisdom on interviewing and essential industry survival skills as the students lean forward on the edge of their seats.
At each firm, students are treated to similar insights across career fields ranging from investment banking to asset and wealth management and trading, along with HR and talent acquisition.
The students also have a chance to impress with insights of their own. At asset management firm BlackRock, they meet equity strategist Mark Garcia ’21, who smiles proudly as the students flip technical material into informed questions on the spot.
Asking questions, Garcia says, will be a differentiator in a field where AI can increasingly perform financial analysis.
“At Trinity, you take classes outside your comfort zone, and you apply this broader perspective to what you’re seeing out in the world,” Garcia says. “That type of knowledge, where people need to come up with new ideas, ask interesting questions, that shows off a skillset that’s going to be less analytical and more creative.”
AI dominates many of the conversations, as students and alumni have frank discussions about how technology is changing the industry. But Zhang and Alexander both say finance will still need leaders who have strong critical thinking and communication skills: areas where they say Trinity students are poised to succeed. And even if students don’t decide to work in New York, Alexander points out that the industry offers opportunities beyond the Big Apple.
“We think of Texas as an oil and gas state, but Texas is also a leader in financial services,” Alexander says, noting that Morgan Stanley, for example, just announced a 4,000-job expansion into the state.
Focused Futures
A broadening field is good news for the students on the trip, many of whom are double majors in accounting and are banking on that potential.
Uchral Altangadas ’28, an international student from Mongolia who helped direct her family's business importing fertilizer pellets made from sheep wool, is committed to the accounting field, but may one day explore options in finance. Fellow accounting and finance double majors Carlos Huerta ’28, Stephanie Hernandez ’28, and Michael Varela ’28 are in the same boat.
Chrishem Bernard ’28, Ethan Bunt ’28, and Alina Turzhanova ’28 also have their own set of dreams. Turzhanova, from Kazakhstan, is on the hunt for openings that might offer stability during a turbulent time for international workers in the U.S.; Bunt has a job in banking lined up in New Mexico; and Bernard is on the hunt for opportunities in investment banking.
Each student says that community was a deciding factor in their decision to come to Trinity, a tight-knit school that blends smaller class sizes with big-school resources. And perhaps this is the most powerful skill on display during the trip. Getting into cabs, riding the subway, even meeting for dinner, the exhausted but spirited group of students never gets tired of each other.
They share origin stories, compare notes on recent job applications, and even turn into sleuths as one student loses their wallet in a cab. (It’s found.) And after the final site visit, the group finally finds time to relax by taking in The Lost Boys show on Broadway.
Jetting back to Texas out of Newark Liberty International Airport, the group’s plane finally rises high enough above the clouds for the students to see Manhattan in all its glamour.
After shaking hands with many of the people who might one day decide their future in finance, each member of the group has an unobstructed view of the heights their careers could reach, too.
All that’s left, Huynh says, is to climb there. “We just need to focus on the work, the networking, and the insights that everyone here gave to us.”