Lila Ontiveros
“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—your peers to partners of the firm—are all so valuable. That differentiates who gets a job and who doesn’t, and who does really well once you have that job and who doesn’t.”
Lila Ontiveros is a senior at the ILR School. She is from Kingwood, Texas and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. She spent the summer working in the Sales and Training Program at Goldman Sachs, an investment bank in New York City.
“There are different stocks or fixed income products or currencies that Goldman trades. It’s a three week rotational program—so, we had a week of training, where we got to know each other really well. There were 168 students in my class. It was a big family type thing. We did lots of scavenger hunts.
“We had all kinds of networking events. That training went throughout the entire summer. We would spend three weeks on a certain desk and we were then 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.
“We would learn all kinds of things about different products or things about the company—or new and upcoming trends in the market. We were also quizzed throughout the day on different things that were going on in the markets.
“The most interesting piece of the summer internship is to understand the culture of the company and 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. I had no idea of 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’m kind of going crazy. That’s something, from my own personal growth, I’ve really 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 all that I expected.
“The world of work is hard work. I learned that being a student and being a professional are very, very different. I learned a lot about teamwork—on and off the athletic field. 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 things we learn in ILR, whether it’s the HR practices or what not, how well those 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 you 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—like I said earlier, I became so obsessed.
“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.
“It all comes down to everyone’s on the same team—everyone wears the same jersey—you’re all part of the same company and if you cannot interact well with people of all levels, then you’re just not going to be able to succeed. I think that from an undergraduate’s perspective, if you go to your professors and you can speak with them very candidly and without getting really nervous, speaking to a partner of the firm should be just as easy.
“But it takes practice. I think a lot of kids went into the summer and they weren’t accustomed to that—so it took maybe six to seven weeks before they could actually get the confidence to do that. But the people, who from day one had the confidence to talk to everyone, were in a much better situation than everyone else.”
