My favorite thing to do as a child was math problems with my dad. Growing up, my dad was my best friend, but he was often busy with work or his many entrepreneurial ventures. However, he always made time to teach me math, his passion, and I came to view math as a way to spend time with him. I loved how excited he got when I understood a problem or begged for more problems to solve; through this, I eventually came to love math as well. Unfortunately, when I was 11. he passed away from cancer. I was absolutely devastated. I knew that to remain connected with my dad, something I needed to do was keep math in my life.

In high school, I took an economics class, and I became fascinated that basic analytical thinking and a mathematical framework can be applied to concepts that govern our global economic systems. After this class, I started a Stock Market Club at my high school to learn more about this and the markets. In hindsight, we had no idea what we were doing, but through attempting to understand financial statements and relate market movements to current news, I realized that this was something I wanted to look into further.

However, even though I was interested in the nature of the work, the idea of finance being a self-serving industry was discouraging to me. I didn’t want to work in an environment where it seemed as though everyone only cared about money and perpetuated decisions that only resulted in “rich people getting richer.” I wanted to do good, not just help others make obscene amounts of money.

This changed, though, after I started interning at the Georgetown University Investment Office, which invests the endowment. The endowment pays out money to Georgetown University each year to provide funding for objectives from financing operations to providing scholarships. Furthermore, the Georgetown Investment Office has a Socially Responsible Investing policy, whereby investments cannot promote anything detrimental to society. Not only is the fundamental nature of the endowment improving the lives of the Georgetown community, but our investments also ensure that more sustainable companies will survive and detract from the amount of funding to companies providing harmful services.

Now, I am a sophomore at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business majoring in finance and minoring in statistics. I am also a Vice President in the Technology sector of the Georgetown Student Investment Fund, which has allowed me to confirm that finance is something that is uniquely interesting to me. It is a dynamic and complex interdisciplinary field, where knowledge in a variety of subjects is combined with pure analytical thinking and quantitative skills. I am confident that through school and my internships, both current and prospective, I will be able to gain the knowledge I need to succeed.

My experience with finance led to me to identify that my ultimate goal is running a nonprofit’s endowment. I want to work for a nonprofit that works to fight against cancer, the atrocious disease that took my father away from us, and use finance in a positive light to ensure the sustainability and success of that nonprofit and its cause for years to come. And hopefully, through this, I will be able to honor my dad’s legacy.