The Cove Street Capital Women in Finance Program—Summer Edition—welcomes Beatrice Woodruff to the team.
After an intensive CFA week of training, and to paraphrase Vince Lombardi, she will receive the normal and customary beatings!
Why am I here? — by Beatrice Woodruff | CSC Intern
Coming into Colby College, a tiny liberal arts school in central Maine, I had only a vague idea of what I wanted to study: probably a social science and maybe something on the quantitative side. After math classes, psychology classes, and economics classes (fully taking advantage of the liberal arts curriculum), I decided econ fit the bill. With my major satisfyingly squared away, the next task was figuring out something interesting to do with my summer. After chatting with a friend about the terrifying concept of the future, she mentioned that a friend of her dad’s was founding this program called Girls Who Invest, which focused on getting women (especially those who wouldn’t have exposure at liberal arts schools) interested in finance and into buy-side jobs: basically the perfect program for an econ major who maybe wanted to go into finance but didn’t really have a clue what that meant. I applied for the program and a few months later received my acceptance. I tacked on a financial markets concentration to my economics major (as well as a Russian major) when I declared that spring and was ready to head into the summer.
In the beginning of June, I headed down to the University of Pennsylvania to begin the first portion of the Girls Who Invest Summer Intensive: four weeks of nonstop finance at Wharton. Those weeks flew by as my cohort and I studied corporate finance, talked to women from all sectors of the industry, and took field trips to various hedge funds and even the New York Stock Exchange to ring the closing bell.
To cap off the Intensive, we were divided into groups and tasked with pitching Comcast to Comcast executives and GWI staff. Using our new found finance skills, we did a DCF as well as other qualitative analysis to present on our last day.
After the four weeks ended, I was placed at an internship with a fund-of-funds in Connecticut. The six weeks there got me right into the thick of the investing world and I got to see how funds of all sizes and types operated. I got my first taste of what it was like to work on the buy-side and I had a feeling that it was the career I wanted to pursue.
Heading into sophomore fall, I began the hunt for next summer’s internship. Buy-side recruitment, especially at a school like Colby, is pretty limited, so I turned to my Girls Who Invest contacts to see if they knew of any opportunities. Fast-forward through the semester and Kathleen Dunlap, the CEO of GWI, sends me the name of a firm in Los Angeles looking to hire a summer intern from GWI. By March I had agreed to come to Cove Street for the summer!
I am so excited to be working at Cove Street this summer and learning all that I can about this industry.
