UC Davis’ student-run Finance and Investment Club is organizing its fourth annual Career Panel, which gives students the opportunity to ask six senior professionals in business and investing about their various industries.
This year’s panel will be held Thursday in the ARC Ballroom at 8 p.m., and it will be open to the entire campus community.
Business professionals from Bain and Company, Ernst and Young, Accenture, Kaiser Permanente, Verinata Health and Applied Ventures will all be part of the Career Panel this year.
“The club looks into the practical knowledge one needs to get into the field,” said Emre Titizer, a regular member and incoming vice president of the club. “The Career Panel brings this knowledge to a much wider audience, giving students the opportunity to ask questions to professionals who are time-tried in the business arena.”
Three out of the six career professionals are UC Davis alumni. The main focus of the club has been having more alumni on the panel because they provide valuable insight into finding careers in business and finance after graduating, club members said.
UC Davis alumnus Steven Tallman, who graduated in 1986 with a double major in economics and political science, will be on the panel this year. He is now the vice president of Bain and Company, a top consulting firm specializing in company restructuring as well as solving business problems for its clients. The company is known for being one of the hardest and most competitive companies to get into as an undergraduate, according to club co-president Jared Hein.
Another alumnus that will be on the panel is Scott Seikeret, who graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in genetics. Seikert is now an assurance senior for Ernst and Young, a major public accounting firm. He has also worked with two of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, Genentech and Gilead Sciences.
Although UC Davis is not a target school for business, the club’s career panel and program offer many opportunities for students to combine their interest in the logistics of business with what they learn in their major, club members said.
“If students are thinking about getting into business later, or they want to get into the business side of their major, possibly getting a master’s degree in business, the career panel is a great place to start for this,” Hein said.
Brian Huwe, co-president of the club, says each career panelist will also have highly experienced and valuable insight into the technicality of investments. The Chief Financial Officer of Verinata Health, Inc., Alf Merriweather, will explain his success with Initial Public Offerings, or the amount of shares a company puts out on the stock market once it goes public. This task is crucially important for public and private companies in raising stock for their development.
Throughout each quarter, the club meets once a week with various topics for discussion and uses a stock simulator for learning the technicalities of the stock market, such as how stocks are priced, what they are trading at and how to analyze the financial statements of a company.
One of the senior members of the club, computer science major Egor Gryaznov, presented his trading strategy at a recent meeting.
“The platform that I’m working on uses historical performance to predict future performance,” Gryaznov said. “It analyzes historical prices and when they were similar to what they are now, and then makes historical simulation trades.”
The meetings are designed to prepare regular members who are pursuing careers in finance and investment-oriented fields and to provide opportunities for networking.
There are a range of events within the club, such as bringing in employers, presentations by successful club alumni, and quarterly group stock analysis projects.
“No matter what aspect of industry you’re interested in, the club seeks to bridge the gap between what’s learned in the classroom and what’s learned in the everyday practice of finance and investing,” Titizer said. “Our main goal is preparing our members not just for a job, but for a career.”
The Finance and Investment Club is now accepting applications for Spring 2012 membership, available at www.ucd-fic.com.
DOMINICK COSTABILE can be reached features@theaggie.org.
