Author: NWIS

Lauren Balukjian ‘06 spoke to us this past Monday about her personal story and how to change our mindsets for success. She played field hockey in college, and that experience has informed how she goes about life. She has always been really competitive and ambitious. After graduating from Dartmouth, she was not sure what she wanted to do and thought that law school was a good opportunity. However, she had no “why” for going, so she recalculated and went abroad for a year. After that, she realized that she has always liked bringing people together and planning, so she got a job in the event industry. From there, she worked at a startup where the work was very intense. She traveled a lot and had 4 kids in 5 years. Her husband ended up having an affair which left her feeling like an imposter, scared, and alone. She took a year to herself to figure things out and learned about the coaching industry. Now, she has dedicated herself to coaching other women. 

She outlined the difference between high achieving and high performing. High achieving is when you are focused on results. You might take short cuts or have unsustainable methods for getting what you want. On the other hand, high performance is more process focused. Instead of fixating on the endpoint, you work on sustainable growth towards a goal. Over the long term, being a high performer will create more lasting improvement and you will not get as burned out. You can find Lauren’s “7 Secrets to High Performance” below. 

At the end of the talk, we had breakout rooms where we talked about 3 questions: the “why” for our sport, the strategy for high performance that spoke to us, and how the shift from high achieving to high performing would positively impact our game. It was a great opportunity to get to know other people in the club and reflect. Thank you to Lauren and everyone else for coming!

This meeting focused on interviewing and the ins and outs of HR. We were lucky to have Corinne Heyes ‘82, Head of HR for Barclays US, and Taylor MacKenzie, Global Head of Programmatic Recruitment at Barclays. 

Corinne and Taylor both mentioned how during recruiting, many women tend to doubt themselves even when they are qualified. They reminded us that confidence is key—we should reach out to our network and be confident that we deserve these opportunities. Some other general tips were to show interest in the job and to be authentic and genuine.

They also discussed resumes. The biggest mistake you can make on a resume is a typo. In addition, make sure to pay attention that your contact information is correct. If you miss calls or don’t respond to emails because of incorrect contact info, the recruiter will not continue to reach out to you. Also, it is essential that your resume is only one page and in PDF format. Even though your word document may look perfect, when it is converted to a PDF something might get messed up.

Corinne and Taylor are both very experienced in interviewing, so they were able to give us some great tips. They both emphasized the importance of asking questions. If you don’t know where to start, ask one question about the interviewer and one question about the role or business. Take notes while the interview introduces themself so you can reference back to their experiences at the end in a question. This shows that you are paying attention, and people generally like sharing about themselves. The other question should be about the role that you are interviewing for or the business.

If a question comes up that you don’t know the answer to, do not make something up. The interviewer will probably see through this, and it will not reflect well on you. You should say something like “I am not familiar with this specific topic, but I am familiar with this related topic”. Another option is to tell the interviewer that you are not familiar with the topic but will look it up and follow up after the interview. It is crucial to actually follow up.

Some other important interview notes are to send a thank you email, follow the dress code, have a clean background (for Zoom), and to always bring a notebook, pen, resume, and water. The thank you note should be short and sweet. You should write a line about the interview, a line about how you are excited about the prospect of working at the firm, and a line about looking forward to hearing back. In terms of dress code, you should always go more formal rather than less formal. It is difficult to get feedback on a real interview, so the best way to get feedback skills is to do mock interviews. 

Mentorship and sponsorship are also very important. You should aim to create a network with people 2-3 years into their career as well as people higher up. More junior mentors will be able to help you prepare for interviews and answer questions while more senior sponsors will be able to help you move through your career. For reaching out to mentors or sponsors, it could be helpful to reach out with a group of friends to be efficient with their time. 

It was so great to hear from Corinne and Taylor about interviewing and HR. We are so thankful that they were able to speak with us!

With Ariel Fortunato (CFP, CTFA), Hannah Tufts (CFP), and Jessica Scott (CFP)

This week, we heard from Ariel, Hannah, and Jessica who all work in finance at Brown Advisory about personal finance. As college students soon entering the adult world, we were incredibly excited for this topic. In school, we were never really taught how to make a budget or how to save money. 

Having a grasp on finances is incredibly important — 53% of adults are financially anxious, 2 out of 3 families lack an emergency fund, 60% of adults had credit card debt in the past year, and 3 out of 5 adults do not keep a budget. Many of us probably fall into these categories, so it was great to hear how we can set ourselves up for financial success.

Ariel, Hannah, and Jessica explained the 7 pillars of financial wellness:

1. Set clear goals
2. Understand current financial state
3. Plan for and protect against risks
4. Make sure investment plan aligns with your goals
5. Review tax efficiencies
6. Confirm that estate plan reflects wishes
7. Clear lifetime gifting plan

At our stage in life, they recommended that we focus on understanding our current financial state, protecting against risk, and setting clear goals. One of the best ways to understand our financial state is to make a budget. When making a budget, we have to:

• Learn where money is going
  • Are we still paying for subscriptions that we don’t use anymore?
  • What categories are we spending our money on?
• Define our wants, needs and priorities
  • What do we absolutely need and what could we go without?
• Set goals
  • What are our goals? 
  • Do we want to save for a trip or have an emergency fund?
  • Are we saving for more long term goals like retirement?

They suggested that we go over at least about 3 months of spending to understand what we are using our money for. Some strategies for tracking spending are through mint.com, a spreadsheet, and setting aside money after paying bills for different categories of spending. They also said that we should have about 3-6 months of liquid cash saved to cover our needs in case of emergency. 

In terms of saving for retirement, starting early is key because of compound interest. This means that money can accumulate quicker because interest is paid on both the original principal amount and all accumulated interest from prior periods. Essentially, the money you save will make more money for you. Even if you can’t put aside huge sums, that does not matter! Save what you can even if you don’t think it is that much. Ideally, once you start a job you should aim for saving 12-15% of your pay in a retirement account. Ariel, Hannah, and Jess said that we should first save for an emergency fund, max out retirement savings accounts, and then use the leftovers for whatever else we determine is important. 

Credit is another important topic. A credit score is a number that helps lenders predict how likely someone is to repay a loan and make credit payments on time. It is basically a measure of how worthy someone is of credit. Credit score is composed of payment history, credit utilization, length of credit history, new credit, and credit mix. Because we are all young and have limited credit history, we should focus on paying all credit card bills on time and making sure that we do not overspend using credit. Credit interest is incredibly high, so you need to make sure you can make every payment. To monitor your credit score, you can use Credit Karma. 

Ariel, Hannah, and Jessica emphasized that every person and their life situation is different, so there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to how you organize your money. Make sure that your budget works for you and that you are able to pay for the necessities and what is important to you. In terms of how much we should be spending on an apartment or housing, they said to look at our full budget and determine how much we are able to spend. Also, for some people apartments are a priority while for others travel and food may be more important. They did recommend renters insurance which can protect against any sort of accident that happens to your apartment. 

Thank you so much to Ariel, Hannah, and Jessica for taking the time to come to speak to us!

This meeting was a big lesson for the exec board. As the club is very new, we are still in the process of ironing out how to market meetings effectively and increase engagement. We advertised Tuesday’s meeting at the very last second, and as a result very few people showed up. Because what we had planned to do would have been more productive with more people, the execs along with the people that came decided to postpone the meeting. Instead, the exec board talked about what strategies to use in the future to improve our marketing of NWiS. The conversation was very valuable, and now we have a weekly schedule of emails, GroupMe messages, and social media posts to promote the club. We are looking forward to the next meeting! 

Women Athletes and Innovation: How female student-athletes can leverage their unique skills to create exciting career paths

This week, Dartmouth Peak Performance hosted a panel of Dartmouth athletic alumni. NWiS was very excited to participate. The panel included Sally Annis ‘97, TH ’98, Amanda Reed ‘85, Tatyanah Castillo ‘20, and Emily Dryden ‘19. Each alumnae had an amazing career story—each one was incredibly interesting and included many important lessons for us to learn from. There were a few common threads throughout: leveraging your network, life and careers are not always linear, the value of being an athlete later in your career, and staying true to yourself. 

Amanda is a venture capitalist and innovator at Global Asset Innovation Advisors. She talked about how when thinking about what career to pursue, you should look at major global trends to figure out what will be disruptive. She also discussed developing a unique skillset to make sure that you are always adding value. In her experience, being a collegiate athlete gives us an advantage because we know from our time as athletes how to deal with struggle and balancing various tasks. In terms of networking, Amanda talked about how creating a strong network for yourself is essential. In addition to more traditional forms of networking, she said that you should always be generous with your time and find mentoring opportunities and moments. 

Sally is an engineering project manager at Apple. She has done a wide range of jobs and did a series of internships throughout her career to see what she liked in different opportunities. She told us her 3 goals that she has used to evaluate if she is on track with her career. The goals are to always be learning, work with people smarter than her, and enjoy her job 90% of the time. She emphasized how you should like what you are doing and to not get stuck in a job that does not advance your goals. She also talked about leveraging your network. 

Emily is now working at a startup called QNOPY as a customer success engineer. At first when looking for a job, she thought she could do the whole process on her own. However, she soon realized that she needed to build a network of people that could lift her up and support her. She started reaching out to people through the alumni network and sent tens of cold emails. She found that people were very responsive and willing to help out. She was able to use her network to eventually find a position. Emily tried to find a job during the Covid pandemic, so it was difficult but worked out in the end. Many of us can relate to this experience as we are job/internship searching now. She told us to reach out if we need help with cold emailing or building our network. She also emphasized the importance of not comparing ourselves to others.

Taty is working at Microsoft as a customer success manager. She also spoke of the struggles to find a job but that athletes are really resilient. She applied to many jobs and overcame the fear of applying by realizing that the worst that can happen is that the company says no. She kept on putting herself out there and she eventually found a job that suited her. When interviewing, she had to dig deep to prepare answers to why tech, why Microsoft, and why the program. She told a great story about her interview at Microsoft where she found her flow by being herself and being genuine. Taty discussed how if you stay true to your values, the right companies will want you for who you are. We are where we are for a reason, and if we stay true to ourselves we will be successful.

Overall, the night was really great, and we all found ourselves connecting with the panelists and their stories. We appreciate everyone who participated!