Profile

I manage mutual funds and retirement funds for people. I’m responsible for approximately $10 billion dollars.

I’m a passive index portfolio manager. That means I essentially invest in equity (the stock market) and we try to provide the returns of a specified index – for example the S&P 500. My typical day will be starting the day looking at how the market will open. I will pull in the stocks I hold in a specific portfolio and make sure those holdings look correct. I also look and see what sort of contributions in terms of redemption or cash that comes into the fund. We also invest in futures and swaps.

The type of investing I do is low risk. With the recent downturn in the market we’ve seen a lot of inflows from people who are looking for lower risk investment. It’s always managing what sort of cash you have, what sort of exposure you have to the market and to the specific type of benchmarks clients are looking for.

A part of my job is administrative related to the fund. if things don’t look quite right, we have to comb thru lots of data to find out where a mistake may be or if the performance is correct to analyze what happened. We rely on operations people to adjust to the holdings and sometimes there are mistakes made that you have to follow up on.

Another piece is interacting with clients – that can be to varying degrees. Sometimes that means conference calls, writing up details on the fund – how well it performs to the benchmark or dealing with attribution which means attributing where the performance is coming from. I spend a good chunk of my time working with the data – at least half of the day.

I do have two children and although it’s rare - I’ve been able to work 4 days a week and 2 of those days are from home. It’s transparent to others when I work from home as my office phone forwards to me at home. I have access to everything I need from my laptop and home computer.

It’s safe to say that a lot of the work I do is more independent in terms of doing analysis. My work with other people is more limited and it’s easy to do that type of work with other people on conference calls, etc.

Problem solving, interest in math and statistics and interest in markets in general. Presentation skills are also really important when you’re meeting with clients. The higher you go in Investment Management and Finance, those presentation skills becomes more crucial. Writing skills are also important. We do a fair amount of writing - writing about how our funds are doing, what is happening in the market and how that it impacting our performance.

It’s also important to be “anal” and accurate. It’s critical that having things correct is important to you. Getting caught up in the “nitty gritty” details is very important in my job. Those details would drive some people crazy but for me I’m sort of anal so it suits my personality – being caught up in the minutia.

I work primarily with finance professionals, however, our clients include a variety of pension funds. I have worked with clients who are fire fighter unions, a paper mill company and churches.

I work 4 days but have the same fund load as someone who works 5 days/week. I work as many hours as someone with a full schedule. I typically work from 8-5 but often log in after my kids go to bed.

Sometimes. I don’t have to travel a great deal but it certainly means there is some travel for board meetings and those sorts of things. When I do travel, it is typically just a one-day meeting and then we usually wouldn’t meet with the client for another 6 months or so.

I really have always enjoyed math and problem solving. One thing I love is when you study finance, it is relative to your personal life. You can apply the things you’ve learned on a personal level and help others in your family think about personal financial planning. To some degree a lot of people try to follow what is happening in the market and economy so you can talk to them about those issues. I think it is so fascinating how finance is such an integral part of our modern day society.

Sometimes when you have a problem with a fund and you’re trying to figure out where the error is, digging thru data to try and figure out what happened can be exasperating at times. There are days when I trade a billion dollars. On those days when you’re moving files, the risk of making an error is really easy and there is a lot of pressure to make sure everything is absolutely accurate. You don’t want to be responsible for any sort of error – sometimes it’s a burden to make sure everything is accurate.

Living a full balanced life makes me happy.

My biggest influence was my mentor who was willing to sit down with me as long as I needed once/week. Even though she was extremely busy she was willing to teach. That sort of sacrifice on her part was such a valuable thing for me – it really helped me become more skilled and be able to move to other positions in the company.

To pursue your passions. Too often I ended up trying to pursue things that were more what other people saw women doing. I have a poster in my office of a famous runner running over hurdles that says “run like a girl”. I always look to that - don’t be held back by things that you normally see men doing even if you don’t have a lot of female role models. Don’t limit yourself and recognize you have potential to do whatever you want to do. You’ll make it work and when you do something you love, it’s not a sacrifice.

My own internal pressure of limiting the scope of view of what I had seen historically and what I had seen women doing.

Don’t be held back by what your vision of your mother or grandmothers world was like. We have so many opportunities now – don’t be intimidated by the fact that you may be the only female in your department if it is something that you’re passionate about.

I probably wouldn’t have gotten my first masters degree and would have originally stuck with finance and figured out it will work out in the end. I would have tried to explore more of what other options were within finance knowing it was something I was really interested in.

I love to hang out with my kids and husband. We enjoy the outdoors and hiking. I also enjoy running and going to the beach with my family. Travelling is a lot of fun as well.

I work 4 days but have the same fund load as someone who works 5 days/week. I work as many hours as someone with a full schedule. I typically work 8-5, but often log in after my kids go to bed. With most careers, people will find earlier on in your career you have to work longer than that. At some point in your life, after you’ve established yourself in some type of framework, it becomes easier to carve out some type of flexible schedule.

For me personally, my ideal job would be to either job share or would be to able to work three days/week but it depends on the function of your role as to whether it is feasible. It is difficult in Finance to find that, but I do think when people value whatever niche or expertise you have developed, there are people you can find that will work for you. It’s not uncommon in my group to find people who telecommute but it’s not necessarily common in my industry to find flex schedules.

I have a Masters degree in Finance and a Masters degree in Speech Pathology which was the original path I took. Later I changed course and actually chose to do something that was more in line with my true passions and interests.

Originally my senior year of high school I had declared my degree in Finance. I had grown up in a small farming community in Oregon and really wasn’t sure what it would mean to major in Finance. I didn’t know anyone who had a degree in Finance and didn’t have a vision for what that would mean in a career. I started looking at what women do that I know – I knew there were teachers and nurses so I started looking at what type of career I could have that would help me to be a good mother. I started limiting myself to what I had been exposed to and what I thought would be workable.

I ended up getting a masters degree in Speech Pathology. I practiced for a little and felt like I really didn’t like it.

I had always enjoyed math and story problems. After I decided Speech Pathology was not for me, I went back to the drawing board and and asked myself what I was really interested in and started out carving out a whole new path. Since that time I have no regrets, I have absolutely loved my career in Finance. It’s much more in line with my personality and interests. I can’t say enough about the importance of doing something that really fits who you are as opposed to trying to fit into something that is not you.

With speech pathology you don’t have a lot of clinical experience until you are enrolled in a graduate program. It’s hard to understand the difference between courses that are interesting and the work life environment. For me there were a number of things that didn’t fit. One, I think my interest in speech pathology was probably more related to my interest in cognition and brain development. In terms of practicing day-to-day, it’s a hard job in terms of working with people who have a lot of difficult circumstances. In speech pathology, if you work with adults you work with adults who have swallowing problems. I ended up spending a lot of time feeding people and helping them to not aspirate their food and develop pneumonia which was something completely different from what I may have been interested in like brain injuries. To get involved in that aspect, it would require a lot of time doing the feeding and swallowing disorders first, and I ultimately didn’t even enjoy working with the traumatic brain injury patients.

I’m the type of person who enjoys sitting at a computer, managing my own schedule. I like to be able to plan it in advance. In speech pathology you get paged to go see a patient, you are going from place to place, you operate with a cell phone and sometimes don’t even have a desk. With the patient interaction, you don’t have a lot of control over choices and the work they put you in. For me, in Finance, I can plan my schedule in advance and it’s a little more controlled. It’s still very dynamic and is changing constantly and there’s always new information to absorb from economics to accounting but I’m the type of person who likes to work in an office.

I was a little hesitant to go right back to graduate school at 26. I decided I wanted to carve out a niche in finance so I looked for an entry level position in a finance-related firm. I ended up getting an administrative position for an investment banking firm for a year. This firm was acquired so I looked for a place I could grow internally that my manager would support. I joined State Street Global Advisors in an entry level position. I was lucky enough to find a fabulous mentor who was a woman who mentored me for years. I encourage young women in any career to find that. You can’t place a value on that. I ended up working with them and took some finance exams and then went to graduate school.

The biggest challenge I have overcome was working in finance prior to getting my Finance degree. It is rare for someone to work and be promoted in the investment management business without a formal educational background in Finance. While I did get my related degree, most people do that piece first.