Student Profile: Finance Career

Kayam Rajaram '08
Post-MBA position: Credit Suisse

I came to SOM from India, where I was a corporate lawyer for four years. I worked on a lot of financial deals, including bond deals, bank debt, private equity, and some IPOs. At the time, the capital markets were exploding. It was a lot of fun, but as a lawyer you’re in a supporting role. A lot of your job involves executing the decisions of the bankers and your client. The more deals I worked on, the more I realized the really interesting stuff was what they were doing. I started thinking about going to business school. I had a family friend who graduated from SOM and is doing very well as a partner in a venture capital firm in California. He was very positive about the school; he really sold me on it.

I really did the right thing. I love finance. I enjoy just about every aspect of it, even the long hours. I enjoy reading about the history of finance, what happened in the ’80s and ’90s, how it’s developed over time. I spent my summer internship at Credit Suisse, working in the Financial Institutions Group, which covers banks, insurance companies, mutual funds, PE shops, and hedge funds. I worked on a number of pitch books for deals that were underway; the kinds of stuff summer interns at every investment bank do. But there were also some bonus projects. I got a really close look at the IPO for a very large, very prestigious, quantitative hedge fund. There was a certain exhilaration about working so hard and seeing the result of that work and its impact on the real world. I’ll be going back to Credit Suisse full time after graduation. I know the next couple years I’ll be working all the time. But I don’t mind. I like it.

Over the course of the summer I noticed there were some unpredictable ways the new SOM curriculum proved helpful to me. Here’s just one: I remember talking to this one senior managing director within the group, and he mentioned that he covers Japanese banks. I asked him if he covered Shinsei Bank, which he did. He asked what I knew of it. And I told him about the SOM International Experience and how I went to Japan, where we met with Thierry Porté, the CEO of Shinsei Bank. He was clearly impressed by this. It was the kind of intangible benefit of the school I never could’ve expected.

Even though I’ll be taking a job in New York, it wouldn’t surprise me if I end up back in India at some point. Things have changed a lot since my father came to the U.S. for an MBA. For a young Indian with a good education, India presents opportunities now that weren’t available for earlier generations. We have the choice to live in either India or the U.S. without sacrificing anything on the career side. I want to go where the opportunities are, given my particular skill set. I feel like I’ve got the best of both worlds.

Interviewed on October 12, 2007.