When I applied for the McGill MBA program in January 2015, I was a Corporate and Investment Banking Associate on Wall Street. I was planning to move to Montreal to join my husband, who had been relocated to Canada a couple of weeks after our wedding. I stuck a cut-out picture of McGill’s campus on the fridge of our New York apartment while waiting to hear back from admissions. Passionate about mergers and acquisitions (M&A), I knew I wanted to transition from investment banking to the buy side after my MBA, and that avenue had to be McGill.
I arrived in Montreal in July 2015 for my first classes as an MBA student in Global Strategy & Leadership. The Career Services Centre – particularly Jean-Pierre Interlino, the finance stream advisor – was an immense resource. It helped me quickly map out the top asset managers in Montreal that I would target for recruiting. I was fortunate to be able to have informal coffees and chats with multiple McGillians working in investment roles in Montreal to prepare myself for recruiting.
Recruiting season came very fast. It had not been six months since the start of my McGill journey, and I had landed an internship with my top choice employer: I would spend the summer term with PSP Investments’ Natural Resources group. Given the investment team I was joining was executing multiple transactions, I received a call from my hiring manager asking if I could start my internship in a few weeks’ time and “hit the ground running.” That’s what I did, and McGill was very supportive in helping me juggle both my multi-semester internship and MBA. My internship flourished into a global investment career and I recently celebrated my five-year anniversary with the firm.
Today, I am a Director at PSP Investments on the Natural Resources team and focus on executing M&A transactions in the agriculture and seafood industries. As a private markets investor, I am responsible for deal execution from sourcing through valuation, deal structuring, negotiation of terms, reviewing legal documentation and conducting detailed due diligence. I also sit on the Natural Resources Investment Committee, represent PSP on boards for diverse agriculture businesses and serve as a co-lead of PSP’s Inclusion and Diversity Council.
The classes that had the biggest impact on who I am as an investor were my Managerial Negotiations class with Professor Jay Hewlin, and Strategy in Context with Professor Elliot Lifson. Professor Hewlin taught me how to formalize my negotiations know-how (from buying goods at the fruit market in Haiti while growing up) to be ready for the M&A world. Furthermore, I enjoyed Professor Lifson’s fantastic case studies on iconic companies that failed to adapt and innovate as their respective industries pivoted, and they saw their competitive advantages dissolve.
I am also immensely grateful to Professor Lifson, who introduced me to my mentor Madeleine Féquière, who has been instrumental in my personal and career development, including my nomination to Excellence Québec and as a board member of Conseil des Arts de Montréal. It has been a privilege to learn from Madeleine’s career path, community engagement, vision and leadership.
My friends and connections from McGill have had a significant impact on who I am and who I am becoming, but more importantly, they became my family in Canada. As a proud McGillian, no matter how busy my schedule gets, I always find the time to lift others by mentoring students seeking finance opportunities, as well as coaching McGillians to support them to achieve their full potential.