I knew I want to major in finance since roughly my sophomore year of high school. I went to a CTE high school which meant that alongside the regular academics we were given a “major” of sorts in which we would be certified by the time we graduated. The major I picked was medical assisting and I very quickly realized that the field of medicine and healthcare is not one I would like to interact with. After realizing that I began searching for others topics that I thought were interesting. Finance stood out almost immediately and my interest in the field began with its scope. Finance and financial services allow you to have some level of interaction with any industry. It is the industry that binds everything together and allows for globalization to exist. I also liked that finance required a lot of research and public speaking. In high school, I was a part of the debate team and started to enjoy both researching and public speaking.

Skipping forward 3 years to 2020, I began attending Baruch college virtually and majoring in finance. When entering college I was very conscious of the necessity of obtaining an internship. Through research, I had done for a debate tournament the prior year, I learned about the Kondratiev wave theory and that a significant amount of economists predicted the 2020s to be a decade synonymous with recession due to the theory. So going into my freshman year I was very motivated to try to find an internship, covid-19 complicated this quite a bit but I still tried to take steps that I felt would help me obtain an internship. I joined the Baruch Finance and Economics Society and partook in a few finance programs. By my second semester, I had accomplished my goal of obtaining an internship. I was given the opportunity to intern for the CSR-S monitor project which is an initiative sponsored by the Weissman center that aims to help standardize ESG/CSR reporting. After obtaining this first internship I was given the opportunity to obtain another through a program called Project Destined.

Project Destined is a commercial real estate training platform. I choose to interview and ultimately accept an opportunity to participate in Project Destined as I thought real estate was interesting and also thought that having 2 internships would be better than 1. Both internships started at roughly the same time with both being virtual at the time. I immediately became interested in commercial real estate, more so than I was in ESG. Commercial Real Estate was a much more nuanced field than I assumed it would be and it became something I wanted to learn more about. I also at the time became interested in a firm called JLL. I did not know much about Commercial Real Estate or JLL but I did try my best throughout the summer to learn more about both. JLL stood out to me as it appeared different than other commercial real estate firms and while I was at Project Destined the people in the program representing JLL seemed the nicest. By the end of summer, I finished my rotation with Project Destined but continued working with Project Destined across various roles throughout 2021 to expand my experience and to be able to communicate with others interested and already working in commercial real estate so that I could learn from them.

By April 2022 I had obtained an internship at JLL I was given the opportunity to be a property management intern for the summer. I believe that the internship was the most transformative event in my life to this point. I was assigned to work with the BGO portfolio, under the leadership of Christopher Gildea. Christopher was an amazing manager and gave me incredible opportunities to learn from him from the very first day. Before starting the internship I was interested in Commerical real estate but looking back really was qualified or knowledgeable enough to work in the industry. When starting to work at JLL I had to force myself to learn and learn quickly as I was given a lot of responsibility. Throughout the summer I was able to work on nationwide procurement bids, proposed the development of an amenity center, won a research pitch competition, won an intern team pitch competition, and learned quite a lot about the different business lines at JLL. By the end of the summer, I was given the opportunity to return to JLL as a property management intern for the winter but wanted to do something else for the following summer.

I intended to be a capital markets intern at JLL for the summer of 2023, throughout the internship I spoke to several different people in the capital markets business line and it seemed exactly like what I wanted to do. So I applied and began interviewing. At the same, I also applied for an internship at JP Morgan Chase under their commercial banking commercial real estate team. JP Morgan Chase was a company that I was interested in working for but quite honestly never really expected to be able to work for. The firm has an incredibly fascinating history and today operates at an enormous scale being America’s largest bank and globally one of the largest banks in the world. Even though Commerical Real Estate is not necessarily a priority in the firm it still would be one of if not the largest Commerical Real Estate firms if it were to operate independently in the industry. So I applied and interviewed not expecting to hear back and began focusing on preparing for JLL interviews. To my surprise, I was told that I would be given the opportunity to be an intern for JP Morgan Chase Commerical Banking as a commercial real estate summer analyst while still interviewing for JLL.

I ultimately did also receive an offer for JLL capital markets and had a very difficult decision to make. I spent the next 2 weeks contacting as many people as I knew to get some nuance to help me make a decision. Ultimately I choose to take the offer from JP Morgan Chase primarily due to it being a new opportunity to learn more about the lending side of the business which I may have never been exposed to otherwise.

So as of now, I will be returning to JLL as a winter property management intern and will be going to JP Morgan Chase in the summer as a commercial banking Commerical Real Estate summer analyst. I am incredibly excited to be able to learn from both of these experiences and feel fortunate to be able to be in the position to do so. My path to getting has been here having been in my opinion one of incredible luck along with some level of good timing on my end. This point however really only marks the starting point of my professional life and I hope to be able to do much more in the future.