University

I first became interested in finance when I joined UWFA and attended the hEDGE Finance Conference in first year. In my second year, I was given the opportunity to visit Hong Kong as part of our school’s international trip to learn more about Asia’s financial landscape. I think this trip furthered my interest in finance because it gave me more perspective into the broad opportunities and careers available the financial industry. 

In my third year I joined the Student-Run Investment Fund, where I was able interact with like-minded individuals and attended interesting informational sessions with industry professionals. This is also where I met most of my team members for the CFA Institute Research Challenge, which was one of my favourite memories from university. I really enjoyed participating in the CFA Challenge because I really liked working with my team, and it pushed me to go beyond what I learned in the classroom in order to understand every aspect of a company from an investment perspective. To me, it was an invaluable learning opportunity because not only did I learn a lot from my teammates, I also learned a lot from the various meetings we set up with industry mentors who gave us helpful advice and feedback. I was very happy that we won our local competition and was able to advance to the Americas Finals

2020 CFA Institute Research Challenge: Waterloo wins first place at the local competition

Last day of Co-op at the EY Tower

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 Co-op at EY

I did my first and second co-op terms at EY in their assurance practice, where I participated in the audit of financial institutions. Since I was unsure about what I wanted to do, I wanted to take this opportunity to explore the accounting path. I think one of the struggles you’ll have to accept of working in audit is that you’ll likely work long hours during busy season. Ironically, that was also one of my favourite memories from working at EY because I really enjoyed the team atmosphere on the audit where I worked the latest and we had a lot of late-night laughs together. I think for first co-op term it is most important to have a positive attitude, build rapport with your team, and ask questions so that you understand the context of what you’re doing.

 Switching Co-ops

​I choose to change roles in my third co-op term because I was always interested in finance and wanted to try a role in that field. Co-op terms are opportunities to try different roles and I wanted to take advantage of that. I completed my third co-op term at Scotiabank as a Valuations Analyst, where our team was in charge of valuing the securities in their mutual funds and ETFs. One of my most memorable moments from this co-op was when the stock market crashed in March 2020 and a lot of our valuations went out of the window. Our team had to scramble to figure out how to re-value our assets and develop new procedures to validate our valuations. 

I completed my final co-op term virtually at Bloom Burton as an Investment Banking Analyst. As it was a boutique investment firm solely focused on healthcare, there were a lot of healthcare experts on the team and it was interesting to hear their perspectives on the pandemic and the vaccine development progress at the time. My favourite part of this co-op was that I was able to listen in on various client pitches to learn about their business models and their needs for financing. As it was a small firm, I was given a variety of tasks and even took the lead on one of the client engagements. I enjoyed working with a small team because I felt like I was able to have more ownership over the work I was doing and was able to see the direct impact from my contribution.​

First full-time

I began applying for full time roles in September, and I received my offer for my current role in December after completing three rounds of interviews. I’m currently working as an Analyst in the Alternate Solutions Group, which is the fintech arm of CIBC. I work in a small team of five to oversee two fintech products related to foreign exchange. The most interesting part of my job is that it is like running a small business, as my team is involved in monitoring every aspect of the products from managing client relationships to product development. My favourite part of my work is doing market research to see if there are additional use cases for us to expand our products.

 Outside of work

My family turning our backyard into a terrain park

Outside of work, I have been trying to read more and trying to find more things to do outdoors. My family is quite active so we used the tiny hill behind our house as the replacement for our annual family ski trip this year. I have also tried to pick up embroidery by buying a kit, and I find it very relaxing to do while I’m watching a show. ​

Future

​I’m happy with where I am right now because I find the work challenging and I think there’s still much I can learn from being on the team. I have found that for me the people that I work with is more important than the exact role I’m doing, so I hope to be able to continue to work with groups of passionate and interesting individuals in the future. 

To wrap up...

​I think that one of the most transferable skills I learned from co-op was attention to detail, and I also believe that it’s one of the most important skills to hone as it’s applicable no matter what role you end up with. I think it’s also important to keep an open mind about different roles outside of the traditional roles you might think of for finance as every role provides a different type of learning opportunity.