Smart Women’s Securities Meets with J.P. Morgan

For Smart Woman Securities, one of Fordham's newest clubs, last Friday marked a new beginning in the organization's professional development. Four representatives from the SWS Fordham chapter joined almost 100 delegates from SWS National at J.P. Morgan's Manhattan offices for a day of personal attention from banking professionals.

Though SWS National has claimed an official partnership with J.P. Morgan since this past summer, Fordham's chapter finally reaped the benefits of this relationship at Friday's J.P. Morgan Mentorship Launch. From a pool of over 200 applicants, which included SWS members at Harvard, Yale and Columbia, six Fordham women were selected to receive a personal J.P. Morgan mentor from a banking division that interested them. Of these six, four made the trip to the launch event to meet their mentors and tour two of J.P. Morgan's Midtown office buildings.

"The J.P. Morgan event was an amazing networking opportunity and it also gave me a great insight into the company and the different segments it is comprised of," Bisera Todorovic, GSB '12, said.

The all-day event began with breakfast in a J.P. Morgan conference room and opening remarks from an associate in the bank's social finance group. The attendees, which numbered approximately 100 women from Ivy League universities and Boston College, were then paired off with their mentors and treated to over an hour of personal job shadowing. Mentors' roles varied from first-year analyst positions in special equities to multi-year veterans in debt capital markets.

After getting a micro-level perspective of J.P. Morgan's day-to-day operations, the SWS representatives were directed back to the conference room where they listened to presentations from J.P. Morgan professionals. These panel discussions covered such topics as women's roles in the firm, how one should construct her candidacy for a position at the firm and how SWS has helped its alumnae to achieve analyst positions there. Angela Terra, CBA '10, is one such SWS alumna who is now serving as a special equities analyst since her founding of Fordham's SWS chapter last year.

"The panel speakers were great, and I learned tremendously about the culture of J.P. Morgan," Todorovic said.

In the future, Fordham's SWS mentees will be responsible for continuing a positive relationship with their J.P. Morgan mentors. SWS National's ultimate goal is that the firm will motivate young women to pursue careers in finance and have an active network already working in the industry.

In addition to the J.P. Morgan Mentorship Launch, Fordham's SWS chapter recently sponsored a lecture by Terence Begley, CEO of corporate banking at PNC. Upcoming events for the organization include seminars on financial valuation and the campus-level SWS investment project.