Student Profile: Choosing a Path

Diana Stein ’10
Vice Chair Fundraising & Outreach, Women in Management; Budget Officer, Jewish Student Association; CDO Career Coach
Summer internship: Nationwide

It’s not a stretch to say I got into finance because of a bad wrist. I played tennis through college and even competed on the professional circuit both during the summers while at school and for a short while after school. In college, my life had two focuses: tennis and school. I went to Duquesne on a tennis scholarship and planned on playing professionally, but three surgeries on my wrist in two years shortened that aspiration.

I had a really great finance professor who became a mentor to me and introduced me to his friend, who was the senior managing director of PNC in Pittsburgh. I always liked finance, and the friend suggested I interview for a position at PNC. Ultimately, I accepted a job in loan syndication sales and trading so I did both origination work — raising debt for companies, producing financial models — and then I traded loans in the secondary market. I loved it there, but I realized about two years in that because of tennis and getting injured, I’d kind of fallen into a career and needed to step back and really evaluate what I wanted to do. I wanted to choose my path, and business school seemed a good way to do this.

The integrated curriculum really attracted me to SOM. Because of my time at PNC and the fact that I majored in finance and accounting in college, I was coming to school less to learn the hard skills of business than to learn how the many different parts of a business relate to each other. Much of being successful in business comes down to leadership, and as SOM offered the most balanced approach to management education I came across, it was a very easy decision for me to come here.

SOM has been everything I hoped it would be. I’ve been really involved in every aspect of the school. I’m a teaching assistant this year, and I’ve been working on an independent project on the insurance industry. I’m also a co-leader of the Women in Management club and helped put together an event in New York for current students, admitted students, and alumni. I see myself as a kind of finance ambassador to women here. Finance is often seen as a boys club, but I think there are a lot of great opportunities for women in the industry. There’s no reason why a woman can’t be as successful or more successful than a man in that industry as long as you’re passionate about it and you enjoy it and the lifestyle works for you.

When I started at SOM, I assumed I’d go to Wall Street for my summer internship and I did get a couple of investment banking offers. But the more I thought about it, the more I became intrigued by an offer to be in a finance leadership development program at Nationwide. It’s an insurance company, but it has a private equity arm and an active finance division. I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to be on the inside of a corporation and see the ins and outs of how one is run.

My role was to develop productivity and sensitivity analyses around the company’s new distribution strategy. I was amazed at how well SOM prepared me for this through the curriculum’s emphasis on understanding how a strategy would affect the organization as whole — employees, customers, and agents alike — rather than just completing the analyses in the finance silo.

But that was kind of the point. I was looking for a place where I could explore what I really wanted to do with my life. And that’s what SOM has been.

Interviewed on April 17, 2009.