State Street Career Trek

19 February 2016

One of the great things about being an MSc student at the business school is that the learning experience is not confined to the lecture theatre. While on the one hand it can be rather challenging and demanding, on the other hand it gives you a satisfactory and rewarding feeling once you succeed and complete a 360-degree experience. The student development team provides valuable opportunities both to extend our knowledge and create work opportunities. As a part of this set of extracurricular activities I attended the career trek to State Street Corp. that took place on 17 February.

State Street is a leading company operating in the financial services, mainly custody asset management and other investment services with global presence. After a coffee reception and an introduction about the company structure, we got acquainted with representatives of the company. They highlighted main functional areas and shared important insights with us which can become useful during job applications. Understanding their operations flow, value chain and internal organisation can give us a competitive hedge during the recruitment process. Moreover, besides being able to apply what we learn during our programme, which is of is of utmost importance, the key message we received was to be genuinely passionate about what we want to do and to build our career path on that passion.

Integrity and commitment is what employers like State Street are looking for. To better grasp these qualities we participated in a group activity that challenged us to think about the most appropriate behaviour to common real business situations. We were presented with situations regarding, among others, ethics, people management, regulatory awareness and client management. The prevalent informal atmosphere allowed us to feel at ease and engage in fruitful discussions with the company’s representatives. They explained the common praxis at State Street, new arising challenges and the main things we should think about when considering working within the financial services industry. The overall message was how important awareness, behaviour and ethics are in working life nowadays.

Many companies, State Street included, are now implementing process stages assessing these features in their recruitment and our afternoon at State Street served as a profound preparation.

We gained a good understanding of the main core activities of State Street together with important insights regarding their CSR activities. This can definitely make a difference when choosing a working environment and the awareness of the company’s representatives in engaging in sustainable activities was surprising.

After the group activities we had time to discuss career opportunities within the company, internal mobility among divisions and some spare time to network with the professionals present at the meeting. Their readiness to answer our questions and the relaxed atmosphere helped us getting the most out of the event.

As a small group, we could speak directly to the attending professionals, get their advice and guidance for our future careers and ask more about their experience in the company.

The whole afternoon has been a great well-organised experience and definitely worth attending. This is only one example of the many complementary activities organised by the Business School that make our study experience unique.

Valentina Conzano, MSc Financial Management