Meeting and Greeting During a Turbulent Wall Street Week

During a week of considerable volatility and anxiety in the financial markets, Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan (CFEM) hosted an upbeat session for alumni and current Financial Engineering students. Nearly ninety people attended the 8th annual "Meet and Greet Wall Street" after business hours on January 17. The event benefited from generous support by UBS. 

CFEM Director Victoria Averbukh with panel members Sebastien Fiaux, Beth Ann Day, Timothy Grant and Jeff Resnick

A highlight of the event was a panel discussion called "The Inside Scoop on Wall Street Jobs". Panelists included Beth Ann Day, Associate Director of Research and Chief Talent Officer at Sanford C. Bernstein; Sebastien Fiaux, M.Eng. '03, Vice President and Deputy Head of the Event Driven and Credit Sector at Credit Suisse; Timothy Grant, Managing Director, Head of UBS Delta Americas; and Jeffrey Resnick, Partner at Goldman Sachs; with CFEM Director Victoria Averbukh as moderator. Panel members were encouraging about the prospects for financial engineering employment. Mattan Horowitz, a current M.Eng. student from Colorado, found the Q&A that followed the panel especially useful, since "we really got to pick the brains of senior managers on Wall Street." 

Among the companies represented at the event were Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Ernst and Young, Investment Technology Group, Katama Trading LLC, Morgan Stanley, Mortgage Investments Inc., Spark Fusion, SurTerre Research, Arden, Dresdener Kleinwort, Bank of America Securities, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, ABS/CD Trading, and Blackrock. 

The 43 students at the event included many who are eligible to spend the third program semester in Manhattan. Earlier in the day, these students had the opportunity to learn more about the third semester and heard a talk by Todd Rethemeier of SurTerre that spelled out the advantages of spending a semester in New York. Rethemeier, a member of the CFEM Advisory Council,  holds a BS and MEng from ORIE and an MBA from the Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management.

While the students were in Manhattan on January 17, they also were able to participate in an interactive workshop on interviewing and resume writing presented by Susan Glendon, a Managing Director of UBS who runs the UBS Global Training organization.

On the day following the event, Iva Vukina, M.Eng. '04, a Wachovia Associate in the Interest Rate Derivative unit, arranged for 27 of the students to have 20 minute mock interviews at Wachovia offices in Manhattan. The students were interviewed by salespeople, traders and bankers, who provided individual feedback.  

Current student Horowitz found the "Meet and Greet Wall Street" event to be a great way to relate to senior managers in a social setting. He discovered that he has "a lot in common with a lot of these senior managers beyond our connection to Cornell" and plans to contact some of them in the future.