Experienced Students Are Wealth of Capital for Each Other

GSB students have unique access to an enormous amount of career-related information: their peers. “You’re never going to have access in your life to the number of people and the varying degrees of professional experiences you have right here,” investment banker Todd Warnock said to the student-led Investment Banking Club on November 8 at the Hyde Park Center.

Warnock, ’88, founding and transaction partner at Roundtable Healthcare Partners, also exhorted students to ask themselves two simple questions: “What do you want to do, and what are you going to be good at?” Applying his advice to job searches, Warnock suggested the answers should be the central themes they return to in preparing, practicing, and personalizing their answers to the standard interview questions.

Although students’ schedules are full, Warnock recommended they take the time to reflect on their goals and interests and expand their horizons while determining what to do next. “If you don’t do it, I submit you will not be successful. And you will end up like 65 percent of my classmates who ended up changing jobs in the first two years.”

He advised students to work out the answers now as a way of investing in themselves. “The return on your own human capital over the next ten years will be the greatest you will ever get,” he said.

— Jenn Q. Goddu