Sponsored by EDHEC Business School
Corporate finance: the words might evoke images of sharp suits and eggshell business cards, but you don’t have to actually resemble the cast of the Wolf of Wall Street to be successful in this field.
Shoumi Mittra proves that better than anyone. A 23-year old wunderkind from Mumbai, she’s already completed 14 months of internships in corporate finance and banking at three major international banks in Asia and Europe, despite the fact she still has a few weeks to go until graduating from business school.
Shoumi caught her lucky break after winning an Eiffel Scholarship, a merit-based government grant given to hundreds of international students from around the world to pursue a master’s degree in France. She used that scholarship to pursue a master’s in management at EDHEC Business School in Nice, a two-year course with a placement year and the opportunity to specialize (Shoumi is on the financial economics track, specializing in corporate finance and banking).
After she graduates this summer, she aspires to work in corporate finance, a field she says she particularly enjoys because it involves financial planning as well as business strategy.
Shoumi Mittra
One thing that’s likely to help Shoumi on her way to that dream career is the extensive amount of work experience she’s been able to amass through internship opportunities. The list of internships on her already impressive resume is mind-boggling.
After spending the first six months of her placement year in Singapore at DBS Bank working in equity capital markets, she spent another six months in Paris at Citibank, where she worked in corporate banking. As if that wasn’t enough, she managed to find time for a 10-week summer internship in London at Bank of America Merrill Lynch working in debt capital markets.
Over the phone, Shoumi gives the impression of cheerful confidence - which is unsurprising given she has every reason to be optimistic about her future.
However, she knows corporate finance will be a challenging profession. She says: “You’re up against people who are the best of the best, and there’s always something new coming your way or something more and more challenging.”
The best moments in corporate finance, she says, come when you finally get to prove yourself. The highlight of her placement year was when she was involved in a particularly high pressure deal.
“There was one moment where I was involved in a really high profile deal because my senior team member thought I could handle it, and it was such a high-stress, fast-moving situation,” she says.
“I’d never experienced that kind of deal before. It was a bond issuance with one of our clients and it was their first bond issuance and it was extremely high pressured and we had to do very well.
“I was constantly learning new things every single second and I was attempting to make sure I was supporting my team in the right way. By the end of it, because they were so impressed by how I was performing, they actually said they’d offer me a full time job if a position became available.
“That was so rewarding because you want to do an internship to learn, but you also want to do it to get a job in the end, and the idea they actually thought I was worthy of getting a full-time offer...It was a highlight.”
Shoumi came to corporate finance with very little knowledge of the industry and her master’s gave her the foundation and tools she needed to approach the job market.
She says: “I didn’t know anything about finance before I started the course, and I knew I needed to get some skills before I would be able to pursue a career.
“I knew I was interested in finance having had a class on it in the final year of my bachelor’s degree. It was the first time I ever felt a connection with what I was doing, and I actually saw myself doing something related to that for the rest of my life.
“The EDHEC course taught me all the basics of finance and I needed that experience. I also didn’t have any work experience, and I knew that if I wanted to pursue a career in finance, it would be great to have some good internships.”
Clearly, Shoumi is smashing it. Will you follow suit?
