From teen trader to managing director at a university endowment

I'd always thought I wanted to be a trader. When I almost got the job that I thought that I really wanted, it really made me soul search, step back and think about, what do I really want to be doing with myself? 

I discovered the world of finance fairly early in my life. I was about 14 years old, and my father was very interested in commodity trading. And so one summer I tracked commodities for him on a daily basis. I would draw charts and we would look at chart patterns and things like that. I got very interested in finance as a result of this, and that's how I decided to pursue that as a career. 

My first role in New York was at a high-pressure stock brokerage. I only spent six weeks in my first job.

I found out very quickly that kind of a high-pressure sales environment was not for me. There's a bank that I worked for, has a branch in Chicago, and they're looking for an asset allocation analyst. It was either one of those serendipity moments. I looked into it. They hired me and moved me here in April of 2004.  

My move from New York to Chicago was driven by the fact that we had an illness in the family, and I really wanted to spend more time with my father before he couldn't talk to me anymore. Most career paths are a combination of luck and skewing probabilities. People think that you pursue a career path. I'm going to go from here to here to here, and that's what happens. It almost never happens that way. 

I think that self-awareness is probably the most important thing you can have. Oftentimes, the best decisions that you make are the ones where you stop and think about it. I think a good self-inventory of skills and aptitude and desires is probably the best first step. Then you need to start talking to people in the industry to say, where can I apply these things? Often in finance, it's very hard to think about work-life balance.

A lot of the jobs in the financial industry tend to be all consuming. I always try to remember is that you only get one shot at raising your kids. I'm going to make sure that I still make the time for my family. You need to remain grounded, you need to have something so that you know that it doesn't take over your entire life.