A Finance Acronym to Remember
Ingrid Tierens, MBA ’95, PhD ’96, spoke to the inaugural class of the Asness and Liew Master in Finance Program at their graduation celebration in December.
- By
- January 28, 2026
- Master in Finance
Ingrid Tierens, MBA ’95, PhD ’96, leads the data strategy team for global investment research at Goldman Sachs. Earlier in her career, she led teams across equities execution, electronic trading, prime services, and equity derivatives in the global markets division. Before joining Goldman Sachs, she worked on the buy side at Merrill Lynch Investment Managers (now part of BlackRock) and JP Morgan Investment Management in London. Tierens is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center and serves on the advisory councils for the CFA Institute Research and Policy Center and the Jacobs Levy Equity Management Center. She was recognized in November as a Knight of the Order of the Crown of Belgium. Below is an edited excerpt from her address.
The University of Chicago will be tied to my first flight ever, from Brussels to O’Hare—a metaphor for taking off toward new heights. Your milestone today resonates profoundly with my own journey.
Standing here before you, I want to share five lessons I wish I knew years ago and that I believe will remain bulletproof, even as artificial intelligence transforms our industry. And because finance loves acronyms, I couldn’t resist framing them with the acronym BOOTH. Years from now, you probably will have forgotten my name, or at best remember me as a woman from Goldman with a European accent. But you should never forget Booth.
B: The B reminds you to be bold. Booth proudly says it, and you’ve already lived it by joining this inaugural cohort. My boldest move was transitioning to electronic trading during the great financial crisis. I was eight and a half months pregnant when I made the decision, which probably stopped me from asking a few important questions. But while that transition was hard, it gave me the confidence to tackle many other challenges. Boldness also means visibility. Don’t be a bystander. Be an active participant.
O: Boldness alone is not enough. I’ve been asked many times what the key to success is. I always answer with this one word: ownership. Ownership means you don’t outsource responsibility. I connect regularly with everyone on my team, no matter how junior they are. It’s very easy to see whether someone takes ownership from the early days of their career. Excuses fade, but initiative and communication endure. When the playbook doesn’t exist, be the one to draft it.
“Boldness also means visibility. Don’t be a bystander. Be an active participant.”
— Ingrid Tierens
O: Even when you take full ownership, you will still face challenges. Obstacles are where the learning curve is steepest. That move to electronic trading happened just days after Goldman Sachs became a bank holding company. Obstacles were everywhere—painful head-count decisions, intense regulatory scrutiny, and my own lack of algorithmic trading expertise. Add a newborn who believed sleep was optional, especially during the night, and it could easily have been a career-ender.
But facing those challenges taught me resilience. The differentiator is not in having an answer but in defining the problem and creating the approach—something for which Booth prepares you well. When challenges arise, chart your own course rather than wait for someone else to solve them.
T: Ties are your force multiplier. Your degree opens the door; your Booth ties usher you through it. Connections don’t happen sequentially. They compound when nurtured. I’m seeing this firsthand yet again as I co-organize a conference on data science in finance. In connecting with one of the speakers, I discovered unexpected links back to Booth professors and even my Belgian alma mater.
Networks grow in unexpected ways. So here are a few suggestions as you leave Hyde Park: Share Booth ideas, volunteer your time, and rekindle your relationships. Keep your ties alive.
H: As your network grows and your ties begin to multiply your impact, the final lesson becomes even more crucial. Success is a confluence of hard work, timing, luck, and the contributions of many others. Humility means recognizing that. At Goldman we like to remind people that there is no “I” in “team.” Some of my best insights came from listening to junior colleagues. I had to learn everything about smart order routing from the people reporting to me. Listening was both humbling and rewarding.
The best careers blend modesty about what you know with optimism about what you can build. Colleagues changed my life. My parents’ trust when I left my hometown changed my life. Education changed my life. Give back by paying forward. That is humility in action.
Finance is dynamic. This masters program has given you the tools to navigate it. But tools aren’t enough. You are the first class. Set the standard for this degree, for Booth, and for how finance professionals lead in an age of AI. Let boldness guide your choices, ownership shape your work, obstacles sharpen your judgment, ties compound your impact, and humility steady your growth. The path ahead won’t be linear. Embrace that. Keep taking first flights—they lead to extraordinary places.
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