Lila Ontiveros
Lila Ontiveros is from Kingwood, Texas and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. She spent the summer working in New York City in the Sales and Training Program at Goldman Sachs.
"I think the relationships that you build within a company over the summer are essential, and I think how you interact with people of all ages-from your peers to partners of the firm-is so valuable. That differentiates who gets a job and who doesn't, and who does really well once they start and who doesn't."
“There are many different stocks, fixed income products, and currencies that Goldman trades. It’s a three week rotational program. We started with a week of training where we got to know each other really well. There were 168 students in my class. It felt like a big family, and we had several fun orientation programs like scavenger hunts.
We also had all kinds of networking events. That training went throughout the entire summer. We would spend three weeks on a certain desk, and then we were allowed to leave that desk. We would go to meet new people and see what the other different products were like. There are so many different things you can do in this open trading environment. Every week, we would have ‘open curriculum day’ and that meant that we were basically in a classroom setting from 9-5, and we would go to work before that."
“Each week, we would learn all different products or things about the company—or hear about new and upcoming product trends. We were also quizzed throughout the day on different things that were going on in the markets.
The most interesting part of the summer internship was getting to understand the culture of the company and seeing how they got us all to be a family. I know our last day, there were people who had tears in their eyes when they left. You weren’t really expecting that going in, because you come in and you’re very overwhelmed. It was a little scary in the beginning."
“I learned so much about the economics of the world. I spent most of my time on foreign exchange, which is where I am working next year. At first, I had no idea who the Prime Minister of China was. I didn’t know anything about a lot of different countries— the stocks of those countries, the economic conditions of those countries. Now, if I don’t read the Wall Street Journal or have CNN, I kind of go crazy. That’s something I enjoyed about my own personal growth. I think it made me become much more like a student of the world and kind of obsessed with learning.
Basically, it was what I was expecting as far as how tough it would be. I don’t think anyone can prepare in the beginning for the exact precision involved. I also think the actual physical adjustment of getting up at 5:30 or even at 4:45 a.m. was very, very different. I was much more tired than I thought I would be. But, the learning part was as good as I expected and made it all worth it."
“The world of work is not easy. I learned that being a student and being a professional are very, very different. I learned a lot about teamwork. I learned that there are always going to be people that you may not necessarily be interacting with outside the work place, but you have a job to perform, and however you feel about this person in or out of the workplace, you still have to do your job as a team. I think that is a valuable lesson that ILR gets you ready for. When you are working in group projects with people you have never met before, you all have to get the job done—you don’t really have a choice.
As far as other things in the workplace, I was pleasantly surprised how the topics we study in ILR, whether it’s management practices or different ways you can negotiate, were executed at Goldman Sachs. You learn textbook terms in the classroom, but to see those textbook terms actually implemented in your daily life—it made you appreciate what we learn here at ILR."
“It was so rigorous and I didn’t know if I wanted to live that kind of lifestyle, but I became so absorbed in the culture and so absorbed in the knowledge of the news and the markets.
I am working at Goldman Sachs next year in foreign exchange. I didn’t even know what foreign exchange was when I got there. The first day, I get this little piece of paper that says I’m going to be working in FX and I said, what is FX? I went there knowing absolutely nothing about currencies and learning so much about currencies, and what goes into what makes a currency worth something, and why that fluctuates, and how to make money off of that. I could see myself doing that for a very long time."