How a Booth MBA Launched a Finance Career

Evan Nguyen, MBA ’25, remembers watching the news with his parents during the 2008 financial crisis. Banks were failing, markets faltering, and families were losing their homes. He was in middle school and didn’t quite get what was happening, but he noticed his parents exchanging worried looks.

In 2020, Nguyen picked up the book After the Music Stopped by economist Alan Blinder, a postmortem on the financial crisis he only partially understood as a kid. Something clicked. “The way Blinder describes how financial institutions and policymakers responded in real time made me want to understand the system from the inside, not just follow it from the outside,” he says.

While Nguyen started his career in consulting, the book got him thinking about a pivot to finance. He made the move just a few years later. Today, he sits on BlackRock’s Financial Markets Advisory team. He’s based in New York but temporarily in Hong Kong, working on the kinds of capital markets challenges that drew him to finance in the first place. He credits Booth’s rigorous curriculum, preeminent faculty, and recruiting prep with helping him switch to the field that’s captivated him for so long.

Moving from Consulting to Finance

A year before Nguyen picked up Blinder’s formative book, he landed a job with the consulting firm Deloitte in Arlington, Virginia, focusing on pension plan restructuring.

“I learned a lot about pension plan liabilities, what is owed to whom and when,” he says. “But I wasn’t learning a ton about the other half—how you actually fund those obligations.”

In other words, the capital markets work that sat on the other side of the balance sheet from his pension liability work. The more he learned about how obligations are met, the more he wanted to focus on that side of the balance sheet.

He set his sights on Booth’s Full-Time MBA Program, which he knew would be tough but would give him the knowledge and skills he needed to pivot from consulting to finance. “You’re going to get more homework; it’s going to be more rigorous,” Nguyen says. “But that wasn’t a deterrent for me—that was the draw.”

“A lot of the investing ideas that shape modern capital markets originated at Booth and are taught by those people still. I wanted to get that exposure.”

— Evan Nguyen

Connecting with Renowned Finance Faculty

During his two years at Booth, Nguyen maxed out at 22 classes, the school’s limit. And he would have taken more if he could. He concentrated in Analytic Finance and Econometrics and Statistics, drawn to the lineage of the program as much as the curriculum.

“A lot of the investing ideas that shape modern capital markets originated at Booth and are taught by those people still,” he says, citing Eugene Fama and Richard Thaler, both of whom won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. “I wanted to get that exposure.”

In professor Amir Sufi’s class, Nguyen learned to break credit spread into its core components, including probability of default, loss given default, and risk premium. This kind of analytical decomposition became a mindset Nguyen would use well beyond finance.

“Taking an amorphous idea and breaking it down into concrete components, that’s something you see across Booth classes,” he says. “Whether it’s working on a model or giving a presentation to a senior leader, it applies to anything.”

Nguyen’s relationships with faculty grew slowly. In his first year, he says he was a little starstruck. These were people who’d written the books, gone on television, and shaped the field.

On a trip back to Chicago earlier this year, Nguyen visited Sufi in his office. Midway through a conversation about the private credit market, Steve Kaplan walked in. Kaplan’s research on finance and entrepreneurship is widely published in academic journals, and he frequently appears in the media to lend his expertise on current events. Nguyen was thrilled to be part of a conversation with these renowned financial experts.

“If you had told first-year me this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Nguyen says.

Evan Nguyen sitting at a table with friends

Nguyen (second from right) with the Investment Management Group

Preparing for Asset Management Recruiting

Outside the classroom, Nguyen served as co-chair of the student-run Investment Management Group. The role prepared him for an asset management career in ways he didn’t expect.

As a first-year, he participated in IMG’s interview-prep sessions with fellow students. He’d hop on late Sunday Zoom calls where small groups practiced pitches and talked through market trends. This preparation gave him confidence for his internship interviews and helped him stand out to recruiters. As a second-year co-chair, with his BlackRock job offer already in hand, he found himself asking the questions.

“I actually learned more helping other people prep for interviews than I did while I was getting ready myself,” he says. “When you’re getting ready, everything’s just a whirlwind. But being on the other side, you have to be on top of things to follow up and delve deeper.”

The role also deepened his relationships with faculty even further. Planning dinners and speaker series meant getting on email chains with professors and chatting with them at events. The more he met with professors outside of class, the more he felt like he actually knew them. “You start small and the relationships grow from there,” Nguyen says.

Nguyen was also named a John E. Jeuck Distinguished Fellow, Booth’s highest merit scholarship, awarded to just five students per year. He vividly remembers the call when he found out he got it. “It was one of the most surreal things that’s ever happened to me,” he says.

The financial relief was significant, as the fellowship covers full tuition and a stipend, freeing Nguyen from the pressure of accepting a company sponsorship that might have pulled him back toward consulting. The fellowship curriculum, led by professor Chris Collins, focused on leadership and how to make an enduring, positive impact on your organization as well as the larger community. They drew lessons not just from business titans, but also from accomplished athletes, filmmakers, and even restaurateurs, to name a few.

The curriculum also pushed Nguyen toward what he calls a whole-person mindset, placing more value on relationships, pursuits outside of work, and emotional well-being. “The big lesson was becoming a more curious person and learning to ask better questions across all facets of life,” he says. “That breadth is something I still draw on.”

One of his fellow recipients lives 20 minutes from Nguyen’s Brooklyn residence. They catch up every week or two when Nguyen is in the US, he says. The first question between the two: “How’s your headspace?”

“It’s an important way to think,” Nguyen says. “Especially when you’re working a lot.”

“Taking an amorphous idea and breaking it down into concrete components, that’s something you see across Booth classes. Whether it’s working on a model or giving a presentation to a senior leader, it applies to anything.”

— Evan Nguyen

Applying the MBA in the Real World

At BlackRock, Nguyen works on a team that combines investment and technology expertise to advise financial institutions and government entities on their most complex balance-sheet and capital-markets challenges.

For Nguyen, it feels like completion. “My first job at Deloitte was focused on the liability side,” he says. “At Booth, I learned about the asset side. And now this role is a great way to tie both sides together.”

Nguyen works regularly across a global team with presence in the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The day-to-day feels familiar. He’ll take a complicated concept, break it down, and tell a clear, compelling story to a senior audience.

For anyone eyeing a similar career pivot, Nguyen has one piece of advice that has nothing to do with technical prep: Lead with who you are, not what you want. At a recruiting event early in his first year, he met a Booth alumnus who was an executive in the finance industry. He’d also played college tennis, another interest Nguyen shares as a former nationally ranked tennis player. Instead of asking for the typical coffee chat, Nguyen asked if he wanted to play tennis instead.

They still text, between Hong Kong and Chicago, and Nguyen sees him every time he’s back in the city.

“That’s the kind of connection you can build at Booth,” Nguyen says.

Chris Collins is a clinical associate professor of leadership. Eugene Fama is the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance. Steve Kaplan is the Neubauer Family Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance and Kessenich E.P. Faculty Director at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation Amir Sufi is the Bruce Lindsay Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, Finance and Public Policy. Richard Thaler is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics Emeritus.

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