Alumni Panel Shares Insight on Finance Career Pathways

The field of finance is vast and covers many areas. It is one of the reasons the Robert H. Smith School of Business brought in a panel of eight distinguished alumni on April 4, 2025, to speak about their field and the career journey that got them to where they are today.

“Finance is this massive supermarket, and we all work in different aisles in the supermarket,” said John Bates ’83, a senior vice president and senior financial advisor with Bank of America Merrill.

The event was organized by Finance Department Chair Geoffrey Tate, Senior Lecturer Michael Padhi and Executive-in-Residence Bill Longbrake.

The event started with the joint panel in Van Munching Hall. Then, students gathered in smaller breakout sessions with each speaker to gain more specific insight into their areas of interest.

Bates said the event was a way to help enable students to get a better sense of what a day in the life looks like for different finance roles.

Each speaker not only explained their particular finance field, but also how they found their way there. For Raj Bector, ENGR  ’98, he earned a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland (UMD) but found his way into consulting at Booz Allen to help him learn on the job how sales and trading work. “Consulting allowed me to kind of get that perspective around what we could do,” he said. Today, Bector is a senior partner at McKinsey & Company.

Dan Crowley ’86, MPM ’90, is a triple Terp who earned his law degree at Maryland and is a partner at K & L Gates, a global law firm, where he leads the financial services policy practice. “Basically, I’m a Wall Street lobbyist,” he said. Crowley explained the conceptual framework around financial policy and financial regulation. “Bank regulation is based on the safety and soundness of the system,” he said, further explaining credit intermediation. “They get deposits, they aggregate the money, and they make loans to people. That credit intermediation process is fundamentally the backbone of the financial system regulated by the bank regulators.”

Elisson Wright ’01, MS ’07, MBA ’07, also did not start his journey at Maryland in business but in biology, eventually moving to Smith to earn a degree in finance. “A lot of the best things in life I have come from the University of Maryland,” he said, mentioning that he met his wife, Sedef Wright ’01, in that very classroom in Van Munching Hall. Elisson Wright spoke about his experience at the World Bank: “That’s where I learned about how countries set up policies and systems. A lot of countries don’t have all of these regulations,” he said. Part of the challenge he faces in his work is generating funding for global public goods, where everyone benefits. “It delivers a lot of benefits for the whole world but nobody’s paying for it, and the burden is on [that country’s] government to put public money toward this.”

Sedef Wright, a vice president of asset management & analysis at Marriott International, also spoke to students, sharing insights about important skills and traits to help students be successful. “The skills you are learning are what's going to carry you forward,” she said. Being able to do the work and have the “fit factor” is important to finding a role that works. “We want people as coworkers. If you are stuck with them on a Friday night at 10 p.m. in a conference room, you want to like that person,” she said. “You want kindness around you.”

As the panel continued, mortgage banking was another area alumni in the field spoke about. “Everybody invests in mortgages. It’s a high-quality asset. Every single mortgage out there is collateralized by its property, so ultimately your mortgage can never really go to zero,” said Shayan Salahuddin ’97, CSO at Integrity Home Mortgage Corporation. Salahuddin said there are 5,000 mortgage lenders across America and that ultimately, the work he does helps people get into homes.

Gabe Schneider ’98, MBA ’04 agreed, “the whole idea around mortgages is, there is a side to it that you might see when you are going down the street but there is an enormous business to it,” he said. Schneider is head of U.S. Funding, Managing Director of Corporate Treasury at BNY and also helped to organize the Finance Career Pathways event. He stressed that for students, the work that got them into UMD is different from the work it will take to get them to their first job. He applauded their presence in the event. “Even coming here today, being with us shows in my mind that you are serious about where you want to end up.”

Tom Michael ’99, MBA ’16, a sales and business enablement director with JPMorganChase, said that for those interested in finance careers, most people don’t get into one role and stay there. “If you get into something that’s finance-related or finance adjacent and you want to make a shift in your career, you are going to have that opportunity,” he said, which many of the panelists highlighted as they shared their journeys.

Student Anelle Genfi ’25, a senior finance major, said the event was really insightful. “I’m excited to go to the breakout rooms to learn more and have a general sense of where I want to go after I graduate.”