All right, let's get started. Hi everyone. My name is Elaine Lu. I am a career readiness coach at Cornell Career Services. My office is located at Barnes Hall. Most colleges have their own career services office. So with my office located at Barnes Hall, we're the central office. So we meet with all students and alumni from different colleges and academic backgrounds. For my particular role, I work with students who are interested in finance careers as well. So thank you for joining me today for the Navigating Finance Careers workshop. This session is recorded and I will be sending PDF copies of the slide deck after sometime tomorrow or today, just so everyone has access to the slide and the links and resources that I have gathered. If you have any questions, feel free to drop your question in the chat box, and I'll be monitoring that as well. To start off, I want to talk about the career development toolkit real quick. You may have already seen this on your Canvas account. Essentially, the career development toolkit is your one stop shop of getting any career support when it comes to your career journey, exploration, or development process. We have a lot of modules from resume, cover letters, job search. We have further education modules if you're interested in pre grad, and we also have industry specific module. I purposely circled the finance module. A lot of the content here is from the finance module, and this course on Canvas is accessible for you 24/7. So if you have any career questions and it's after work hours or on the weekend or holiday, you can always go on the career development toolkit. Most likely, your answer can be found in one of these modules. If you do not see the career development toolkit, you can always scan a QR code or utilize career.cornell.edu/toolkit to access the career development toolkit. Now, this is the career development cycle. This is our theoretical approach when it comes to advising students or alumnis when we're working with them. So in this career development cycle, there are three stages, and you can start at any stage and cycle around. So there's that understanding yourself stage. So what are your interests, values, strengths, and goals? The explore options is utilizing different resources, networking, learning from others, participating in different activities like clubs, volunteer, part time jobs, full time jobs, internships, and taking action is the application part, which is creating your cover letter. Creating your resume, or practicing your interview skills. Throughout these three steps, Cornell Career Services is here to support you. Through our one on one appointments or even through workshops like these. For today's session, we are in the Explore option phase where you're learning more about the finance careers. Today's learning outcome, we're going to discuss some common careers and finance, some skill set for this particular industry, what that recruitment timeline looks like. I do want to emphasize that this timeline that I'll be going over is more geared towards rising sophomore. So students who are going to be sophomore for this coming fall semester. However, a lot of the information in this workshop is still good information to know if you're a first year student, third year or even a senior. We are going to talk about networking tips, how to find opportunities to network or apply for opportunities, what that resume format looks like for finance careers and how to prepare for those behavioral and technical interviews, and some next steps. So to start off, I want to discuss corporate finance and an overview of that. So corporate finance is when they cover fundings, capital structure, and investment for corporations. Professionals in this field will advise on capital rising and managing different accounts, budgets, or plans for liquidity for large companies. Liquidity is basically the amount of cash or the amount that the company owns, without executing live deals. Some sample job roles are financial analysis. This is when they manage capital budgeting by estimating or monitoring annual revenues, assessing equipment, acquisition deals, and evaluating project profitability. Credit managers oversee credit decisions, including determining supplier credit limits, rates, guidelines, and managing receivables and their securitizations. Pricing analysis decides product service, pricing, by analyzing costs, and identifying cost saving opportunities. I do want to emphasize that these are just some sample job rules. There are other fields within corporate finance as well. This slide talks about commercial banking and what that looks like. Commercial banking involves traditional banking for individuals or small businesses, and some of the services they provide is deposit taking, interest payments, and reinvestments. These roles focus on providing customized financial advice, including lending and investment recommendations, and the sample jobs are credit analysis. This is when they evaluate loans applications, assess financial stabilities, and collaborate with financial professionals. They manage credit reportings and report findings. Branch managers oversee all branch activities. This includes customer interaction, account services, staff leadership, and essentially, they want to optimize the bank performance. Mortgage Bankers focuses on home loans, applications, credit checks, and advises client on financial decisions and building relationships with real estate professionals. The last overview that we're providing is financial services and investment banking, which is a very common route for a lot of Cornellians. Investment banks are financial services companies or corporate divisions, which provides advisory services about financial transactions for individuals, corporations and governments. Investment banking manages merger and acquisition deals. There's that buy side and sell side, and they advise on initial public offerings and conduct due diligence and research to propose merger and acquisition opportunities to their clients. The sales and trade. Within sales, they focus on client relationship and sales for type desk, which includes equity, fixed, commodity, and foreign exchange. Trade focuses more on managing the risks of a portfolio or book, which is essentially focusing on the efficient client transactions by minimizing costs. Asset and Wealth Management uses information about their clients, wants and specific situation to tailor a personalized investment strategy, and equity research researches, and analyzes a group of stocks, bonds, or other assets, and forecasts their clients future returns to determine if assets are undervalued or overvalued. And then they communicate that to the sales and trade team. So what I listed for those three previous slides were some career paths within the financial industry. There are so many ways to learn more about them too. So on this particular slide, I have additional resources for you to explore. On the left hand side, I have Vault guides. So Vault essentially has a lot of online guides that covers different fields or different career paths. So let's just say you might not be interested in finance. So they have some different fields like consultant, accounting, pre law, et cetera. So within this Vault  guide, this image, I particularly filtered out investment management. And as you can see, there's hedge funds, investment management and private equity. There's a lot of other Vault guides that you can view to learn more of the financial industry, and within these guides, there step by step guidance of what to expect. What is the timeline like? What is the interview process? What are certain financial terminology you should be aware of or different skill sets and how to prepare? I highly recommend checking the Vault guide to support your exploration process to see which sector of financial interests you. There's also other helpful tools that you can utilize to learn, and that's on the right hand side. So we have the Corporate Financial Institute, Investopedia, Wall Street Prep, Wall Street Oasis. So within these four first bullets, they essentially help you talk about different industries, different fields of finance, and how to enhance your skill sets for those particular roles. The fifth bullet is ONET ONET is more so to support your exploration process. So ONET is a government database with a list of different positions and industries for you to learn about different roles. So if you go on ONET, you can essentially type in financial analysts or financial advisor role. They will list out all the different tasks or responsibilities, duties, and skill set related to that particular role that you're searching. So that gives you a better understanding of what to expect and what skills is needed for that position. Lastly, you can always go to employer's website and network to learn about the different services or different opportunities that they have to offer. All these information and resources is actually on the finance modules, so I highly recommend checking out the finance module. This slide talks about some skill sets that is essential for financial industries. So when it comes to academics, major does not matter. Your major does not define the career that you will go to after you graduate from Cornell So but it is recommended to have some sort of financial background or interest or experience. Although you may not come from a business background, economic background or math background, it is helpful and it is recommended to take some sort of financial accounting, statistics, economics, or Excel, whether it is taking some courses through Cornell or doing some LinkedIn Learning courses. Those are always good information to know when it comes to entering to that field or preparing for that field. GPA does matter for the financial role because some banks actually have a GPA cutoff of a 3.5. What GPA cutoff means is that they look for applicants that have that 3.5 or above. If you don't have a 3.5 GPA or above, there's other ways to go around with that. You can always speak with a career advisor to look for other opportunities, or you can always network. Speak with the recruiters and employers to learn more about their requirements when it comes to looking for candidates. When it comes to technical skills, there's that analytical thinking, financial planning, budgeting, risk analysis, cash flow management, and Microsoft Excel. Those are some technical skills that they look for in their candidate, and you can learn some of these technical skills from either some coursework through Cornell, or even do some self learning through I don't know, Linkedin Learning. Those are some ways that you can develop or improve your technical skills. Behavioral skills that they look for are communication, persuasiveness, problem solving, decision making, detail oriented and time management. As you can see, there's a trend of having some sort of knowledge of finance or economics through the academics and technical skills that I just mentioned. And it's always important to stay up to date with different market trends as well and familiarize yourself with different finance terminologies On the previous slide, I mentioned some different resources that can help you familiarize yourself with finance terminologies and skill sets. So NACE is the National Association of College and employers, and essentially, within this organization, they identified eight career competencies that employers look for in their candidates. So NACE is a combination of college administrators or educators and employers. So within these eight competencies, there are career and self development. Communication, critical thinking, equity inclusion, leadership, professionalism, teamwork, and technology. There's a combination of these eight competencies and the skill set that we mentioned in the previous slide, you may have already developed some of these skills through your coursework or your club experience, volunteer experience. Those are some skills that's very important for you to highlight on your application materials, such as your resume and cover letter or even have conversations when you're networking, or speaking with an employer or alumni. If you want to have a discussion about these competencies and skill sets and how you can communicate them on your documents or conversations, you can always schedule appointment with a career advisor and we're happy to help and support you in that way. What is networking? Networking is when you're creating or cultivating, fostering some professional relationship by seeking out and connecting with individuals who support your career endeavors There's two forms of networking. The first one is informal interviews. This is when you're learning from others, whether they are alumnis, employers, friends, classmates, family, mentors, and so on. When you're learning from others through these 1 on 1 conversations or group conversations, essentially, you're preparing for that position or industry. You're being exposed to what they're doing. Or what they did, and you're going to be able to get some specific tips or insider knowledge for your preparation process. This can also help you be more aware of which sector or which industry you're interested in. This can also help you develop your network and share your interests and goals for someone who is in that field that you're interested in. To learn more about networking, I highly recommend checking the career development toolkit networking module. There's a lot of information of how to initiate that informal interview. What questions to ask during that informal interview and how to follow up or send thank you message after the informal interview. The second form of networking is going to fairs, info sessions or workshops to connect with potential employers. This is a really good way to learn about the job or to look for a company that best fits you. When you attend to these info sessions or have these conversations with employers or recruiters, you get insights about the recruitment process or the application requirements. Sometimes the recruiter will also tell you what type of questions to anticipate during the interview process. I always highly recommend checking out those info session, networking sessions with recruiters. You can learn more about that type of sessions or attending to fairs on the fairs module on the career development toolkit. The Fairs module talks about what to expect during in person and virtual events. When it comes to networking for finance, it's important to know that there's two different types of finance banks or corporations. So there's the Boutique banks. So this is where they are smaller banks that specialize in certain areas of investment banking and handle smaller deals. Bulge brackets are multinational banks that handle billion dollar transactions and employ people in the financial centers around the world. So they're slightly different in size. So some helpful tips to remember is that employers actually track the attendance of who go to their events or info sessions. They also document their interactions too. You want to enter these networking sessions or conversations to learn about the company, learn about the role. It's important to dress business formal or casual, if you can, because you want to to impress. You want to make sure you're giving a good first impression. When entering any of these conversations, it's important to research the employer, so you know how to prepare questions or know how to follow up with the conversation to check in with them. You always want to enter being professional and being curious and respectful. It's always important or helpful for you to track your engagement. Document or journal, what day you met with that particular person, what was their name, what was their conversation like? Because that's a really good way for you to follow up with them and maintain that relationship with them. And foster some connection for them to continue knowing who you are and potentially how they can share their experience with you or how they can help you in a way. Networking is very important when it comes to relationship building. Focus more on relationship building when it comes to networking. When it comes to finding opportunities, we always recommend students to check out Cornell's handshake page. I know most of you should be or slightly familiar with handshake by finding today's session on handshake. Essentially, handshake, Cornell handshake. A lot of university utilizes Handshake as well, but they have their own accounts. Cornell University handshake is geared towards Cornell students or alumni. The opportunities in jobs and internships that you see on Cornell Handshake. The employers are the ones who are directly posting it on Cornell Handshake page. They're trying to connect with Cornell students in a sense. Those recruiters or employers are also the ones who post those networking sessions to meet with you. It's always important to check out Cornell handshake to see any opportunities or networking opportunities with the employer or industry of your interests. There are also general search tools or job boards that you can utilize such as LinkedIn, indeed, or Glass door. And there's also specific industry job boards like efinancialcareers.com, financialjobbank.com, or if you're interested in FinTech, which is the intersection of finance and technology, there's built in New York City, I'm sorry, builtinnyc.com. In addition to all these job boards, there's also employer websites that you can apply for. If you have a particular company that you have in mind, you can always go to their job website to apply for those opportunities. I do want to highlight that a lot of employers or some employers have early insight programs. Early insight programs are more geared towards first and second year to expose them to the financial industry or opportunities. These ranges from one day to a week long, and it's traditionally for underrepresented groups to introduce the financial services industry to help them prepare. So each application for these early insight programs vary depending on when they submit them or release them and when the application deadline is. So they all vary. So the best way to know when those early insight programs are coming out or if there are any is connecting with the employer. So I spoke about a handshake before, but I wanted to give more of a visual to everyone who is here today. So as you can see within this slide, I have a screenshot of the handshake website. On the left side, I circled and have a arrow, a yellow arrow on Update profile, and you want to click on Make your profile standout. It is very important for you to start by updating your profile by putting any of your recent accomplishment or accomplishments, whether it's your course work, projects, or experience on your handshake profile. When you attend to these network events on handshake, most of the time you have to register or you have to sign in. So people who facilitates or coordinates the events, they actually get the attendance list of who registered and they can click on the attendees' profile. For example, for all of you who register for today's session, I can actually see who registered and click on your student profile. That's why it's very important for you to update your profile because when you attend to any of these employer events, they can click and look at your experiences. So on the orange arrow, I circled the Job and events. This is a really good way for you to learn and connect with employers. And on the right hand side, I indicated three networking events or workshops with different banks that I saw at the time when I created the slide. So we have a event with Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America. So I just wanted to give you all an example of different networking opportunities that you can find on handshake. Speaking about different opportunities with employers. Within this slide, I talk about jobs and internships and how to find it on handshake. If you go on the menu bar on Handshake, there's that job section. So once you click on the Job tab, you can see that there's over 30,000 opportunities listed on Handshake for Cornell students or alumnis. Obviously, 30,000 is an overwhelming high number. What you can always do is filter it out by what type of roles you want Do you want a full time internship or part time job? You can filter out by location. If you want to work on site, remote or hybrid, and you can always type in the keyword search. Within this particular example, we see there's a Bank of America, private bank, sophomore Summer analyst opportunity. It's important for you to look at when the job was posted. We see that I was posted two weeks ago. It's quite recent at the time when I created the slide deck. So some employers may forget to remove their job posting. If you see like a job posting that was posted about six months ago, that might be something to consider. We don't know if that job is still available because it was posted six months ago. So you want to keep an eye out of when jobs were posted on handshake or in any platform before applying. If you have any questions of whether or not that position is still available, you can always message the recruiter or employer. So as you can see where it's above the position, private bank sophomore Summer Analyst. We have Bank of America. If you click on Bank of America, it'll lead you to the employer's page, and sometimes it actually indicates who the recruiter is. So that's a good way to contact the recruiter to see if the posting is still available. But in this particular example, we see that students have to apply by October 2, and it was posted two weeks ago. So it's most likely still available for this particular experience that I found. Aside from looking at when the job was posted or the deadline. It's important to read the job description and the job overview. You have a good understanding of what that job is going to be like or what that internship is going to be like and what the responsibilities and job qualifications are. Understanding the qualifications and skill sets that they're looking for can help you showcase fit on your resume document to ensure that you're passing the resume screening process. We'll talk about that in the next slide here. When it comes to resume and format and rules. For finance careers, it's very important to have a traditional black and white color font resume. You want to make sure it's one column because when it's one column, it's easier to read. For this particular resume template, you can actually find it on the career development toolkit resume module. Let's assume everyone in this call is either a student or a recent alumni. Whether you're a recent alumni or student, you want to indicate that your education is on the top part after your name and contact information because that's your most recent experience or accomplishment or something you're currently working on. Your education would be first. Next, you could highlight some relevant coursework, especially if you do not come from a business background, econ background, or some sort of management. Having some relevant coursework related to that field of finance by demonstrating some knowledge of economics, financial accounting, algebra, some math courses is always helpful because it allows the reader to know your experience and knowledge. As I mentioned earlier in the slides, your major does not define your career. After your education, you want to highlight any relevant experiences or activities, whether it is doing a previous internship or a part time job or any clubs or on campus involvements. Following that will be your skills and interests. When it comes to creating your bullets, it's important to include some sort of metrics or some sort of outcome if you can do it. That would be either you're managing a specific budget or you're collaborating with a certain amount of number of people, or maybe it would be you're hosting a certain amount of events for your campus club. And when you're creating these bullets, you want to utilize the star method. The star method is basically acronym for you to demonstrate a story or craft a story within your bullets or interview. Star is situation. What was the situation? Task is T, what task needed to be accomplished. Action is A, what actions did you take? Result is R, so what was the result of your action? If the star method is something that may be a little bit confusing for you, three questions that I always ask students to reflect on when they're creating bullets are, what did you do? Why did you do it and how did you do it? So those are three good reflection questions to consider when you're crafting your bullets. One last thing about bullets, you want to include some sort of analytical skills and abilities. That's always something that they look for in finance roles or experiences. You also want to highlight any previous internships or clubs or organizations, any coursework or projects related to finance. So when you include these type of clubs or projects or coursework experience or some sort of involvement, it makes it very clear that you have some sort of interest in finance and you have the experience. As I mentioned earlier before, grades do matter. If you have a GPA above 3.5 it's very recommended to indicate that. If your GPA is not above a 3.5 GPA, you want to make sure that you network or you connect with a career advisor so we can discuss any action plans of how to find other opportunities or work a way around it. You can also include your SAT scores or ACT scores as well. Now, this slide talks about interview prep. So typically, these finance interviews will be either two rounds or three round interviews. So if we talk about the three round interview process, let's talk about the first round first. It typically involves a hirevue or a video interview. So this is when you are getting a camera, whether it's your phone, your tablet, or your laptop, and you're recording your interview answers and you're sending it to the employer. The second round interview is often involved with phone calls or virtual interviews with behavioral and technical questions. The final round interview is also known as the Super day. This consists of back to back interviews or behavioral or technical questions. Behavioral interviews focuses on this is their opportunity to showcase your interests, your skills, and your experiences to the employer. The employer is evaluating how your experience might support their company and how it aligns with them. Some common questions they will ask is, tell me about yourself. Why did you choose finance or why are you interested in finance or tell me about time. Tell me about time you worked in a team. Tell me about time that you demonstrated financial modeling. So they want to hear a story whenever they asked about that. Tell me about time. Technical interviews is when employers are testing your analytical capabilities. Some main topics are accounting concepts, equity, value, enterprise value, valuation metrics and multiples, discount cash flow analysis, merger models and leverage buy out. If you feel like there is areas for you to learn more about those technical interview process or technical questions, Within these slide decks, there are a list of resources that can support you in that area. Now, this slide talks about the recruitment timeline specifically for sophomores. Students who are going to be entering their sophomore year for this coming fall. This is when as we enter our fall semester for 2024, this is where you start your summer internship search and network for summer 2025. Sophomore internships are limited, so you want to think outside the box of where you can find opportunities. That can also include research. Doing a research with a Econ professor or math professor or maybe working in a bank. So you want to think outside the box and be creative, right? As fall 2024 ends and we enter to December and winter break. As mentioned earlier, this is where early insights and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging programs application opens. You want to keep an eye out on those and maintain your connections when you're meeting with recruiters or alums or anyone who work in that organization or industry that you're interested in. Winter break is a really good time for you to start preparing for those technical interviews or technical skills, and you can utilize Wall Street Prep or Wall Street Oasis or Linkedin learning. There's a lot of resource for you to hone in and develop those technical skills. As you complete your fall semester as a sophomore and enter your spring semester as sophomore. This is when you start applying for your Junior summer internship recruitment process. So your junior summer is going to be summer 2026. So while you're applying for your summer 2025 internship, or looking for opportunities for summer 2025, you're also looking for summer 2026 opportunities because junior year internship recruitment starts early. March and April is when those boutique applications start opening up. As those boutique applications open up, you want to keep practicing your interviews, whether it's the behavioral or the technical interviews. May is when the bulge bracket opens, so you want to practice interviewing for those as well. I do want to note and highlight and emphasize that this is a general timeline and some applications might go off cycle. If you have any questions or you want to go more in detail about this, you can always schedule appointment with a career advisor. If you're a first year student or if you're a junior or senior, you can always set an appointment with a career advisor and we can develop an action plan or a strategy for you as you do your internship or your full time job search. So the forage is a really good opportunity for you to gain some project or independent experience if you want to develop more experiences or projects on your resume or develop some skill set. So Forage essentially is a website with a lot of job simulation. Within this picture that I included on this slide deck, I filtered it out by banking and financial services. As you can see, there's a lot of job simulations with different banks. We see JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citi, JP Morgan Chase. You can access Forage by scanning this QR code, or you can utilize the link. So within this description of Forage, you can learn directly from leading companies and gain valuable career readiness skills by completing their virtual experience on their website. Once you complete the Forage project, you will get a certificate, and these are some stuff that you can include on your resume document or talk to employers during your interview. So a lot of these employers actually promote and emphasize these opportunities for first, second, third or fourth year students to do on their own. It is a really good conversation start because they also know from completing these projects, it allows them to know that you understand what type of project you will be doing with that particular employer or you have some relevant experience that you can highlight. The next resource is Vault I mentioned this resource earlier on. It was it was formerly called firsthand. So there's a lot of guides about different companies, different positions related to finance or different types of job sectors. So I highly recommend checking out the Vault guides. As I mentioned earlier, they talk about different companies, different sectors of finance, different terminology, what type of interview questions to expect? What type of skills is required. So this is a really good way to support your preparation and exploration process. Another important note that I want to emphasize and highlight that if you're interested in finance or business function, it's actually really important to stay up to date with the market. You can access free news sources such as New York Times, Wall Street journals, or Yahoo Finance as a Cornell student. Being up to date with the market will give you a better understanding of different market trends, different stock trends, which is essential when it comes to entering the financial industry, as we mentioned earlier on in the beginning of our slide deck. A lot of these roles revolve on understanding the market trends and different stocks and how to make specific investments. Additional resources that you can utilize is Morning Brew, seeking Alpha, S&P Capital IQ pro, or you can also look at Company 10K or 10Q reports. Personally, I really enjoy listening to Morning Brew daily every morning on my commute to Cornell campus. They talk a lot about different news trends or things that are happening around the world. It allows me to stay up to date of what's happening. That's always good to know when it comes to working in a business function or a business career path. Some next steps is you want to identify roles or experiences that interest you. You want to explore platforms that can help you develop your skills and find opportunities. You can reflect on the skills that you want to bring or want to develop. You want to organize your applications, and you want to connect with people to help you explore your interests or learn from them. You want to prepare your application materials as well, and you can always schedule appointment with a career advisor. You can connect with Cornell career services at Barnes Hall, we're open Monday through Friday from 8:00 A.M. To 4:30 P.M. You can always schedule appointment with me or any of my colleagues. We do a lot of resume, cover letter, linkedin reviews. We do practice interviews, such as behavioral and case interviews if you want to do consulting careers. We do a lot of advisings and career exploration topics for you to identify your career goals. We do assessments as well for you to identify your interests and strengths, and we definitely do help with job and internship search. You can follow us on Instagram, stay connected with any upcoming workshops or opportunities with us, and of course, you can always connect with your college office as well.