 Welcome everyone to this virtual launching leadership conversation with Farah Khan class of 98 and Monica Landry class of 90. I'm so pleased that you've tuned in and very excited about our conversation. But we will begin as we always do with our land acknowledgement. Mount Holyoke begins each event in the life of the college by acknowledging that those of us in Western Massachusetts are occupying the ancestral land of the non attack people. We also acknowledge the neighboring indigenous nations, the Nipmuk and the Wampanoag to the east, the Mohegan and Pequot to the south, the Mohegan to the west, and the Abenaki to the north. We encourage every member of our community to learn about the original inhabitants of a land where they reside. The impact of colonel's excuse me, the impact of settler colonization contributed to the displacement, removal and attempted genocide of indigenous peoples. This land acknowledgement seeks to verbalize Mount Holyoke's commitment to engage in shared responsibility as part of our collective humanity. We were we urge everyone to participate in action steps identified by indigenous community based organizations. Thank you. And now, as I said, I'm very excited to welcome all of you and our special guests, Farah Khan, class of 98 and Monica Landry, class of 90. I'm so pleased to have these two alums, both of whom have achieved great success in the world of finance as my conversation partners today. We are going to learn more about the world of finance today and how they navigated their careers and what has been a male dominated arena. I'm also pleased to say that both are members of the MHC Mount Holyoke College Board of Trustees. Thank you both for your leadership and service to the college. And because we are coming to you on Zoom, we have the opportunity to invite many members of the MHC community to join us, including some of our alums, our trustees, faculty, staff, and most especially students. So we'd like to actually know who is in the audience. We have an affiliation poll in which you can indicate whether you're a faculty, staff, student, alum, or some other affiliation friend of the college. So please take the time to respond to the poll. But also you'll have a chance to ask questions of our participants. We're going to have a conversation. I've got a few questions teed up, but we will be eager to hear your questions and we'll get to some of those at the end. But you don't have to wait till the end to post them as you hear something that you're curious about. Please put your Q&A in the Zoom question and answer section, and we will get to those toward the end of our conversation. These conversations, all which we've had throughout the year, are really intended to highlight the career paths of our graduates, recognizing that those paths are not always straight. Sometimes they curve and bend. It's always interesting and often inspiring to see how the intellectual adventures of a Mount Holyoke education have been the catalyst for these exciting career journeys. So to begin, let me introduce each of my conversation partners. And I'm going to start with Farah Khan, a member of the class of 1998. An international student from India, Farah applied to Mount Holyoke site Unseen on the advice of her older brother, Navid, who is studying at MIT and was very impressed with the Mount Holyoke students he met at a conference. The rest they say is history. Farah applied, graduated as a Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude graduate of Mount Holyoke College with a BA degree in Economics and Mathematics in 1998. She later received an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Today, Farah is a managing partner at El Caterton, where she is focused on global consumer growth investing. Prior to joining El Caterton, Farah was a vice president at Sandler Capital, where she focused on investing in technology, media and telecom businesses. She also worked at APAC's partners, a global private equity firm, where she focused on investing in consumer businesses. Prior to APAC, she worked in the investment banking division of Goldman Sachs, where she focused on corporate finance and M&A coverage of retail, media and technology companies based in both New York and Menlo Park. And if you're wondering exactly what all of that means, no worries, we're going to ask Farah to explain what she does. I'm also pleased to introduce Monica Landry, a member of the Mount Holyoke class of 90, where she majored in not economics, not math, but psychobiology. Yet just four years after graduation, Monica joined Feralon Capital Management in January 1994, where she began her career in the accounting department and office management. After two years, she transitioned to start the operations group and began trading. In 2001, she was promoted to partner and led the trading and operations department until she retired in December 2019. Prior to joining Feralon, she worked in a variety of finance and office management roles at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, known as FEMA. So we're going to start with Monica. How did you get from psychobiology at Mount Holyoke to Feralon Capital Management? And what exactly does a trader do? Well, first, Beverly, let me say it's a pleasure to be here with you and Farah and with so many of the Mount Holyoke community that is able to join us. I'm always humbled and overwhelmed to be asked to share my stories today. And I've seen the other leadership stories that have been out there. And so we have an amazing group of alums out there. So I look forward to hearing more stories in the future. So as you said, lots of our paths take a lot of twists and turns or bends in the road. And I'm sure many people on this Zoom may be started out in one major and transferred to another major. So I had a few shifts along the way and originally thought I was going to go into medicine and follow in the footsteps of my parents. And that shifted a little bit after I struggled with Chem 150, that kind of decided to make me pivot a little bit in the fear of taking organic chemistry with Professor Smith back in the day. So I looked at some other options, but still love the sciences and decided to become a psychobiology major. So my new plan was that I was going to go into research and I thought that was really going to be my future. I really enjoyed the lab and I joined doing all the experiments and working with other people in the lab. And I did a senior independent study and worked with rats and studied the thyroid gland. And after many late nights in the lab, you know, you had to do everything on schedule, right? So I was there at midnight or two in the morning and doing the injections or taking down data or doing my observations. And I thought, this is really not for me, you know, I need to have people and interact and have some sort of engagement that, you know, working in a lab for the rest of my life wasn't really what was going to work for me. So when I graduated in 1990, you know, we were kind of in a recession, jobs were hard. I moved home and got, you know, kind of what a job that I could get just to pay my rent and, you know, buy my ramen noodles at the time. But I decided that I wanted to go into hospital administration and that just because I kind of had a love for medicine and that was a big exposure to me growing up. So I worked at the Brigham for a while, but then again, with life changes and the zigs I moved to San Francisco and decided to try something new and move across the country to do something different after growing up in Massachusetts. So same thing. I needed to pay my rent. So I took a job as a temp at the time because that's what you did back then. And depending on how old everybody is on this call back then, we didn't have LinkedIn. We didn't have Indeed. We didn't have zip recruiter and all those things you actually waited for the Sunday paper to come and you opened up the Wadads with your highlighter and you circled everything that was interesting. And then you wrote your cover letters and, you know, like everybody does today when you send in your resume, hope somebody called you back or called you up for an interview. So fortunately, the temp job I got was actually at Feralon Capital. So I worked there for a few weeks and luckily I did get another job offer in the area that I was interested in. I got a job at UCSF to run their residency program, which is a big deal. They're the second biggest residency program in the U.S. Second to Harvard and it was very exciting. So I gave my notice to Feralon and said, thanks a lot, but I got a new job and they countered with an offer and said, hey, we really want you to stay. And I said, what am I going to do? And they said, we don't know. We just really like you. We think you're smart. Come in and we'll just figure it out. And I think my dad probably had a heart attack when I told him I decided to stay at Feralon and not go take the really, you know, no risk at all. A great job at a great hospital and a great position, but it was one of those things that was a little bit of a leap of faith and it ended up being probably one of the best decisions I ever made. So I had a great 26 year career there. I was fortunate that Feralon was kind of a startup at the time. I was the 13th employee. So I got a little bit of definitely a lot of luck with a lot of hard work married together, resulted in a good career. And as you said, I started in the current accounting department. I did a variety of other jobs. You know, one of the first things they did was they said, we need a telephone system. And I thought, what the heck do I know about, you know, buying a telephone system? But, you know, you dig in and figure it out. And, you know, one thing led to another. I worked in the accounting group for a few years and the trader needed a lot of help. And we had worked together on a few projects and he kind of tapped me on the shoulder and said, hey, why don't you come work for me? And I worked with him to start the operations department. And then he wanted to go on vacation. So he said, you're going to start to learn how to do this. So he was a great mentor and leader and friend to me. And I started to do the trading. So sorry, that was kind of a long story, but to answer your question on what does a trader do? So I work on the public space. Farah will talk a little bit about the private space a little bit later. So we're actually in the market buying stocks and bonds. So I was tracked at my desk all day and looking I had, it was like Star Trek, you know, I had four screens I was looking at and looking at the news that was coming out and how much stock was trading, looking at all the news that was coming out there, whether it was low here in the U.S. or in Asia and monitoring all our positions that we held and making working with the investment side of the team to say, hey, if we want to buy 30 million dollars of Google, how are we going to do that? And what's the right price and how to execute it? So I was on the execution side of things and worked with all the broker dealers in order to try to get the best price for any of the stocks and positions that we were buying or trying to get the highest price when we were selling at the time. So that is a very interesting story from psychobiology to selling or buying Google shares. But now let's turn to Fara, who in some ways your path for us seems a little more straightforward because you managed, you know, you majored in economics and math and it's not an uncommon background for someone who moves into investment banking. It seems a little more direct. But tell us about your early career steps and how that led to what you do today. Absolutely. And Beverly, I want to echo what Monica said. It's an absolute honor and privilege to be talking with you today. You've been one of my role models. I think we crossed paths during my time at Mount Holyoke and Monica, in listening to your story, there have been quite a few parallels actually. So as Bev mentioned in her introduction, I'm originally from India. I was born in India, but I grew up in a lot of different countries around the Middle East before I came sight and seen the footsteps of Mount Holyoke. And interestingly, like Monica, actually I wanted to be pre-med as well when I started. My father is a civil engineer by training. My mom is an educator. She taught chemistry at the university and college level in India. And for me, I came in guns blazing thinking I'm going to be pre-med. I signed up for organic chemistry and bio my first semester and I said, oh my gosh, I got to fulfill all my liberal arts requirements. So I took an intro to economics class with Professor Hartley at the time. And I remember distinctly that one of the early classes was him asking us to bring the Wall Street Journal to the class and him literally opening up a world of commerce and how the whole world is interconnected for me by helping us translate what I thought was another language. And so for me, it really kind of much like Monica, I was those endless hours in the labs. I'm like, what am I doing? And whereas the world of economics was something that I could make sense of how my life and unfolded and having lived in a lot of different countries, understanding supply and demand. Right. So for me, I had the opportunity as a Mount Holyoke student to do my third year at Dartmouth College where I ended up taking classes in the engineering school there as well as Spanish language classes and did internships in strategy consulting and banking. And frankly speaking, those internships are the ones that really opened my eyes to the possibility of what these careers mean. So as I mentioned, I ended up majoring in econ and math. Math came quite naturally to me. I ended up having that as a major. Economics was a passion that I fell in love with at Mount Holyoke. And in tasting my internship experiences is when I actually led by Robin Newstein, who's a fellow board of trustee, who was one of the few early women partners at Goldman Sachs at the time with her direction and support was able to interview at Goldman. And for me, the introduction to Goldman Sachs was really my entree to the world of corporate finance and business, understanding, mergers, acquisitions, IPOs, how companies make corporate finance decisions and think about growth and how to finance that growth was a fantastic learning experience for me. So from the years of 98 to 2000, these were the robust, you know, joining the workforce in an up economic cycle. I did about 13 deals in my two years at Goldman. And here I'm going to date myself, but I helped open up their technology practice in Palo Alto, literally pitching to the likes of eBay and Web Fan and Amazon around how they need to think about financing their growth. And so my being able to apply my economics and math education to investment banking was something that I loved. I loved what I was doing at Goldman. They gave me an offer to stay and actually at the prodding of my late brother, who was actually in the public equity world at Fidelity Investments. He was one of the youngest portfolio managers at Fidelity. He's the one who kind of mentioned this kernel of you should try investment banking. You know, you have an analytical brain. On the other hand, you love working with a lot of different people. So combining the analytical side plus your combination of being able to work with a lot of different types of personalities. It could be interesting for you to apply those skillset in the world of investing. And so I ended up interviewing at a firm called Apex Partners at the time. And that really was my introduction to the world of investing. I had the opportunity at the age of 23 to really just being able to work with high growth businesses around the world. So I was working with brands like Build-A-Bear Workshop, Lifetime Fitness, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein. It really helped open up a chapter that I frankly didn't even know existed. But being able to be of counsel, be a thought partner, be an investor and owner, and really help navigate these brands' journey as they think about how to map out their growth strategy and then how to go finance it and how to then find the right talent to go execute it. So that was effectively over 20 years ago. I went on to get my Stanford MBA but came back to the world of private equity investing and have been frankly been doing it ever since. What's really striking in both of your stories is this really incredible opportunity that came at a very young age. You know, Farah, you said, you know, at 23 I was doing these things and I'm thinking to myself, you know, at 23, who's paying attention to what a 23 year old says, except clearly you know what you were talking about. And Monica, you know, here you are, you were working at a hospital, you know, the Brigham women's experience. And then you go out to San Francisco and you need a temp job. And of course, as you said, circling the ads in the newspaper. But then you are offered this job that's really doesn't have much to do with psychobiology in the traditional sense. But if you think about, you know, the understanding of some dimension of human nature that comes through the psychology of psychobiology and and the analytics, both of you talking about essentially the analytic approach to solving problems that comes with your STEM backgrounds, you know, that that willingness to dig in and figure it out. As you said, Monica, it seems quite striking, but that both of you had mentors. And I'm wondering if we could just talk a little bit about the role of mentors in these stories. Monica, why don't you start with that great mentor you met at Feralon? Yes, he was, you know, it was it was really great. I was one of those things where we I think in general when we talk about Mount Holyoke, we think about being humble or almost a little bit and posture system syndrome in that I was like, wow, they're asking me to do this. I don't even know what I'm talking about, but OK, here I'm going to do it. So, you know, having the mentor and having people, I think, give you those responsibilities for me, gave me the confidence. I thought, well, they know what they're doing. They have more experience than I do. If they believe in me to this, I must have it in me to do this. So I really wanted to, you know, prove them right and show that I was able to do it. And, you know, I'm sure it probably took me three more hours than it should have been to start in that, you know, there was a lot of late night hours of being there and, you know, looking on the web for doing things to understand, you know, the difference between a stock and a bond and an interest payment and a coupon and, you know, duration of things and all of that. So there was a lot of playing catch up and getting up to speed. But my mentor and not only him, but the firm was so small at the time, it was very nice. It was a very intimate community. So I felt very open to going up to everybody, whether it was in the coffee room to while we were getting coffee or in the morning when there was a small opening, I would say, hey, you know, I didn't quite understand what you meant by that. Can you help me out and can you explain that to me? And it was just so great. They were so I think they were all so busy. They were really happy that somebody was taking an interest and they thought, well, if I can tell her how to do this, then I don't have to do it anymore. So that was kind of what kept on happening is that I was very eager and raised my hand to do everything because I just really wanted to absorb more and more information. And it was to your point a good way to get to know people. You you know, you learn and everybody learns in different ways and and everybody teaches in different ways. So, you know, you would kind of go down the path and say, oh, well, you know, Beverly is really somebody I can really identify and work with and we can communicate well together and I understand what's going on there. So I kind of took the time to explore who was around and kind of found the person who really kind of spoke to me the most. And I really felt like there was going to be a value add and we could have a relationship that worked both ways. So he was very helpful to me to just come in every day and take some time late at the end of the day to help me out and really kind of show me the ropes because I think deep down he really knew that I was going to help him and take a lot of work off his his plate. And that's, you know, it's probably selfishly for him. That's what he was looking for. But it having those relationships and also makes me and I'm sure Farah feels the same way of, you know, paying that paying that forward as well of finding those people in in the workplace who you really feel you can help give the leg up that you feel as a shining star who's going to come up there and, you know, kind of pay that forward and bring other people along is also very important, I think. That's a great point in terms of how you do pay that forward. If someone mentors you, you mentor someone else. The chain continues. But Farah, talk about your mentoring experiences in that regard. Yeah. And by the way, just pulling on the thread that Monica was talking about in terms of paying it forward. I mean, that, frankly, for me, as I now think about this stage of my life, it's very important as I think about what legacy I want to leave for women in finance. And it's through conversations like this, where I want to make sure we're expanding the dialogue and at least sharing what's possible in terms of possible career paths. If any of this resonates with you, where you're sort of thinking to yourself around, hey, I have analytical skills. I love working with people. I love this concept of being able to work with young growing brands and the like, right? Just to be able to offer that up as a possible path. So I hope this is one of the outcomes of this conversation. And then I'm so sorry, Farah. I just want to take this opportunity to say that we do have a representative from the Career Center tuned in Rashonda Godfried is on. And so if there are students who say, gosh, I want to do what Farah and Monica did, you know, there's someone at the Career Center waiting to help guide you in that direction, if that's what you're interested in. That's great. And what I was going to say is for me, I've expanded my definition of quote unquote mentoring to what I like to call my personal advisory board. And I think that this is something that much like Monica's approach did. And I would encourage all of you to think about, you know, for me, one of the great things that Mahogany taught me was critical thinking skills and being open minded and being intellectually curious and always learning. Because the only thing constant in this world is change. So we need to make sure whether it's artificial intelligence, whether it's the abundance of data, whether it's cutting through the noise of everything that's thrown at us, being able to sort of rise about the noise and be able to say, OK, what's actually critically important and how do I constantly learn and find resources to learn and grow. And so for me, it's mentoring has been not just one person. It's embodied in my professors who I still have a continuing relationship with. It's actually the women that I went to Mount Holyoke with. It's my peer group from business school. And it's, by the way, interestingly, in my analyst class at Goldman, the women who were not shy about raising their hand and asking questions interestingly happened to be fellow women's college graduates. Right. So having the confidence and the intellectual curiosity to raise your hand to learn to me is the best is the best way that I knew how to navigate an increasingly complex financial world with markets going up and down. So that's number one. Number two, I think with mentoring, I think of it as a two-way street. So as much as there's resources for you to be able to go tap into and people to learn from or information sources to learn from, I do think the onus is also on us to be your own best advocate. So to be self aware to think about what is it that you're good at? And I know Monica is in the public equity side. I'm on the private equity side. We'll touch on that in a little bit, but constantly being able to question, what are your strengths? What gets you excited to jump out of bed and do what you do every day and be able to lean into those strengths while also acknowledging your sort of your development areas? So I think unless you can be your own best advocate, particularly in a male dominated environment like finance, I think it's super hard to just tap into mentors. You need to be equally confident about knowing your strengths and then advocating for what you want. You know, both of you talked about confidence. And Monica, you mentioned the word humble as sort of part of the Mount Holyoke ethos. And I, as you know, have been very interested in what I'm gonna refer to as boldness, right? And that phrase boldness comes actually from a Mount Holyoke alum who I learned about at the beginning of the year of an alum named Sheila Marcello who has been a very successful entrepreneur, co-founder of the business. Many of us are familiar with or have heard about on television care.com. And she described herself in an interview as needing to be authentically bold. And she said in defining what she meant by that, when you bring your truest self to the table, you are able to be bold in your own authenticity. And there's lots of evidence in the stories that you are describing each of you and your journeys of that kind of authentic boldness. And I'm wondering how you would answer this question. How did Mount Holyoke, your experience at Mount Holyoke, help you find or deepen that sense of authentic boldness? Me or you, Farah? Go for it, Monica. Well, you know, it's funny when I hear the word bold a lot of times I think of like one big effort, that goes into it, where I think I would break it down that I think it's a series of effort, right? Life is a very long journey. And to your point, Beverly, when Farah and I were 23, the way we behaved or what we knew was, minute compared to what the experiences and the professional interactions and the help that has been. So for me, I think in the, as you said, Farah went through kind of maybe a more traditional path after Mount Holyoke to get into finance and mine was really a little bit non-traditional. To me, what Mount Holyoke gave me that boldness to feel like I belonged wherever I was going to be. And they provided me a foundation to, as I said, I didn't know what finance was, I didn't know what a hedge fund was, I didn't know what public investing was, but it gave me the confidence that I knew if I could open a book and sit there and go through it, I was gonna be able to figure it out and look at it. And if I didn't, all out of Farah's point, I knew I had a big community. So I leaned on that community, whether it was professors at Mount Holyoke or friends in the area or colleagues or everybody else to help me say, you can do this, you're always gonna have a little bit of self doubt and concern. And when that happens, that's what's so great about having the Mount Holyoke community behind you, your friends around you, your family, professors or to Farah's point, previous colleagues that you've developed relationship to say, hey, I'm facing this problem, how am I gonna deal with this at the time? So I also think it's important like people make mistakes, we all make mistakes. And I actually think that that's a great foundation to learn from, because once you make that mistake, you're gonna make sure you never do it again. So it's a hard lesson to learn, but it's almost, I think one of the more most important ways of learning. And I would just say, don't beat yourself up when that happens. It's gonna happen and it builds character and it actually makes you stronger and makes you wanna work harder to make sure that doesn't happen again. So I think in a world where we are, where everybody's held to a very high standard and you feel like if you get that one thing wrong on that SAT test, you're not gonna get to the school that you wanna get. It's a lot bigger than that. So, and I think embracing it and knowing that it's there and knowing that you have all the core skills and understand it and bandwidth to be able to overcome it and come out better on the other side is important. Thanks, how about you, Farah? So this really resonates with me, Bev. And I think that for me, particularly as we step back and think about investing as a career choice, finding your authentic voice to me is a critical, critical path for success. And I say that because you need an edge and what does that mean, right? I can look at a privately held company. I'm gonna look at a publicly held stock and other managers and money managers can look at the same business plan or company or brand but come at it with a very different perspective on what makes this business special and attractive as an investment opportunity or not. And for you to be able to come to the table or an investment committee discussion to have a point of view, to be able to defend that point of view, I think you do have to be authentically bold to be able to defend your opinions. And for all the students and alumni listening to this, I mean, we're all through the Mount Holiuk education well-prepared to be able to do the work, to be able to do the research, to be able to communicate and defend the point of view. But what we have to be making sure are particularly in investment environments where by the way, mistakes while you don't wanna lose capital which is rule number one of investing, you do wanna be able to learn from your mistakes. So it's, you know, you're never batting a thousand, it's pattern recognition, it's that muscle building of looking at lots of different similar types of businesses in a particular industry or particular stage of growth where you need to kind of build on that and be authentic with yourself or okay, what is my distinctive point of view? How do I bring that to the table and how do I defend that? So I think it very much translates to what Monica and I do on a day-to-day basis and it's critically important to what helps us succeed. Thanks. Now, as I am aware of our time, it goes by so quickly. I want to open the floor to some of our audience and I have seen a question already which I think fits in right to this conversation as we're having it right now. And that has to do with being one of few women in the workplace. We have referenced the world of finance as traditionally male oriented. You mentioned Farah that Robin Newstein was at the time the only woman or maybe the first at Goldman Sachs that opened the door for you. But as you've navigated in your daily work and I'm thinking right now about your situation Farah, I'm imagining the time that you spent working in Latin America, which we know tends to be a male centered cultural context in this male centered world of finance. How you navigated that as perhaps not only a woman but a young woman at that time. Yeah, no, that's an excellent question. Bevin, this again, I would take back to everything I got not only from Manholik, but frankly my childhood experiences that helped shape me become the person I've become. As I mentioned, I grew up in a lot of different countries. So frankly that forced exposure to culture and languages and religions and people that gave me a worldview that frankly has helped me become the investor that I've become and bringing that global perspective to bear. So it was interesting when my co-CEO has asked me to do Latin American investment. My first response was building on the imposter syndrome that Monica was alluding to earlier. I'm like, what about me speaks Latin to you? And so frankly, their response was something that actually really helped kind of open my eyes to go take a risk and make that happen. Which was I had done emerging markets investing before I speak the language. I do have experience working with lots of different personalities and people. And I grew up in the world at Catterton, my current firm. So I knew our approach to underwriting and how I think about partnership and portfolio company building. And interestingly, there's a lot of corollaries whether it's from a cultural perspective, family values perspective with India and a lot of different regions in Latin America. So much like India by way of example, which has a lot of families owning a lot of big conglomerates and big industries, Latin America has a similar dynamic. And I went in thinking I'm gonna get a very much a macho Latin culture, but I was pleasantly surprised to actually meet a lot of women in C-suite and founder positions running these big businesses who welcome me with open arms. So that was super interesting and positive. And frankly, even for I did not at least so far in my almost decade working in Latin America have come across the macho. It's very much have been the opposite. There's been my years of experience of learning what I learned in developed markets as well as emerging markets being able to bring that to bear in helping brands, family businesses really level up and grow to the next stage has been for me personally an interesting intellectually challenging experience but also personally rewarding where from an impact perspective I find that we're making change and bringing developed market knowledge to some categories and industries where it's really making an impact whether from a gender diversity inclusion perspective or just business building knowledge as well. So Monica, as you think about, you know you shared actually a lot of information about the ways in which the men you are working with at barrel on really boosted you and gave you opportunities perhaps out of their own self-interest but nonetheless that really helped you grow. And I'm wondering if there was ever a time of particular challenge where you said I don't know if I wanna keep doing this. I think that came towards the end when I did get burned out at the end after 26 years. Being in San Francisco and being a trader I was at my desk at five a.m. every morning. So waking up with a four handle gets a little tiring after a time which is funny everybody wanted me to join crew when I was at Mount Holyoke and I refused. I said, I'm not getting up that early to run down to the boat house. Are you crazy? And then I turned out to do it for my career so it's a little bit funny. So I think there were periods of time I never really thought I was gonna stay in San Francisco. So the job was good. I was enjoying it. It was something new. It was exciting. It was in a different space but I always thought I would go back to school. I had looked at some NBA programs that I was gonna apply to and I was gonna move back to the East Coast where my family was. And really things at Farallon's kept going so well. I kept thinking, well, why would I leave? This is so great. And the firm, it was exciting. The firm was growing. So the firm right now is almost 300 people and I started, I was 13. So I really felt I was part of this great story and everything that was happening. We used to only be in San Francisco and then we opened a London office and we opened a Singapore office and we opened an office in Sao Paulo and we started one in Tokyo. So to be there and part of all that, it was almost like something was flowering every day. So it was really exciting. I guess deep down I'm really a little bit of an adrenaline junkie too. So it was exciting to be part of that. And a lot of the times, the things that I was doing since I was running the trading and the operations, a lot of compliance, I was kind of picking up things behind the scenes and making sure everything ran smoothly. So with that, there was a lot of crisis management. So there was a lot of fire drills every day in order to deal with that. So it made it very exciting. Nothing ever really got routine for me as much as the trading every day and waking up at the same time was routine. But what I walked into every day was a new chapter of what was happening. And that just led to Ferris Point, a lot of intellectual challenges to being there and collaboration working with the rest of the team and the partners there to figure out a way to go and being a little bit entrepreneurial of, hey, we've never invested in India. How do we do that and figuring that out? And it was just great to have that community around and to be a part of that. So it kept me stimulated for a very long time. I was very fortunate. So I said in your introduction that you retired in 2019 and I'm here to describe this. I am for adrenaline rush. So how are you getting that adrenaline rush now in your post-Feralon life? Well, in my post-Feralon life, I'm still a senior advisor for Feralon and doing some special projects for them. And actually one of the things I do for them in the world of only there being a few women in finance is mentoring women at Feralon and trying to start an actual mentorship program there, which is one of the projects I'm working on, which has been very fun. And I've connected with new incoming summer interns and either people I've worked with for a long time or some new people. So it's been fun to do that. And again, it's something that I don't necessarily, it's not something you can study for. It's kind of a more natural thing that you have to deal with on each interaction, but that's been fun and keeping me busy. I'm also a very avid skier. So I ski a lot. And I've joined the board of Mount Loy Oak, which is also a commitment and on a couple of other boards and doing some other charity work. So there's still not enough hours in the day for me to be honest. I would say I sleep more than I used to for sure. No need to start at four in the morning or five in the evening. Yeah. Well, I just want to take a pause here to say to our audience, if you've got questions, please put it in the Q&A. But in the meantime, I have plenty of them. So I'm going to keep going. And Farah, I want to ask you about your life outside of work. I know you're a global board member of two nonprofits, American Indian Foundation and something called Her Future Coalition. Tell us about both of those organizations. Yeah, absolutely. So like Monica, I have the pleasure of serving on Mount Loy Oak's investment committee as well as the board of trustees, which I absolutely think it's my opportunity of giving back to the college. And it's a very much a full circle moment for me. So that's been amazing. And in addition, I did join the Global Board of American Indian Foundation really leaning into my dual identities of being American Indian and being able to serve and impact not only my local community here in the US, but being able to do that really in India as well. And the other organization, Her Future Coalition is something that my family's actually supported for a long time. It's a little bit of a dark topic they're helping. It's a woman founder, Sarah, who works and helps with women suffering from human sex trafficking, particularly in India and Nepal and a bunch of other countries globally. So as I think about how I want to spend my time outside of work and professional responsibilities, I do want to make sure I have time to prioritize spending time with my four-year-old daughter Anaya, who I think you can see in the background there. Yes, I got that photo. And also being able to really think about pointedly on how I can scale my impact and leave a legacy that's positive for future women in finance. So whether it's even joining women's committee and initiatives at Carrington, but even outside of that, being able to find ways to really scale my impact and be there as a mentor to other women in the community. Well, as you think about, this is a question for each of you, Monica, maybe you can go first, but as you think about your younger self, right, back at Mount Holyoke, anticipating what you might do in the future, I'm guessing what you are doing now is not what you originally imagined, right? We heard about that a little bit in your story, but if you think about, you know, we're six weeks out from graduation. I don't know how many seniors we have on our Zoom call today, but what is one piece of advice you would give to this class of young people, the class of 2023 getting ready to transition from Mount Holyoke into the world of work or perhaps graduate school, but eventually, you know, on a career path? Sure, great question. You know, I think in general, if I could tell myself at 21 years old when I was graduating was really just to know, to really appreciate what Mount Holyoke has done for me and that really school was hard for me. I wasn't a natural student. I spent a lot of time in the stacks and a lot of time in the library while I was there, where for a lot of other people, it comes easily. So I was definitely challenged at Mount Holyoke and really looking back, I attribute so much of kind of the soft skills that I have to a lot of your success. From you were able to write, you were able to orate and deliver speeches, you were able to work with other people in group projects and in order to have a common outcome. And some of those people, you might have thought worked hard. Some people you thought might have skated by and you have to deal with a lot of different personalities. So I think Mount Holyoke, you're just gonna work hard and those soft skills are there and you actually have more than a lot of other people who might have only done engineering and only know how to do one thing. So having a broad experience and having those skills I think is really important. I think really just believing in yourself because you deserve a seat at the table and you're gonna be able to work with anybody who's there and be on par if not better than anybody else. So really just believe in yourself and know that you have a great support group. You have your professors that are at Mount Holyoke, you have the rest of your community there and lean on them when you need them. Sometimes it might be to help you work through a struggle time. Sometimes it might just be to lend an ear but that's really important. But I think Mount Holyoke has given you that foundation. So just really lean on it and believe that you have a right to be at that table. Great, what about you Farah? No, Monica, you articulated it so beautifully. The only thing I would add is don't be afraid to take risks. Like I said, change is going to happen and you have to be able to bet on yourself, make mistakes. This is an ever-changing world with risk come higher awards. And so that is another piece that I would just counsel you to think about is it's okay to be uncomfortable and put yourself in situations where you're trying out things because you can rest assured that you do have the academic foundation, the work ethic and the people skills to go make it happen. Well, in that spirit of taking risks, one of the questions we've come that has come in is about taking a risk within the career. One person is asking who works in finance is saying, how do I transition from one area of finance to another? Maybe there's a sense of being, maybe pigeon-holed a little bit. How do you break out from whether it's private to public, public to private or in some completely new area of finance? Any advice? Yeah, perhaps I can start, Monica, feel free to chime in. First of all, it's great that you're thinking about it and just taking for my experience in private equity by way of example, when I started off in the industry back in 2000, that was 23 years ago, it actually is not as established and big and diversified as it is today. And so I just happened to kind of interview with the few firms that were interviewing analysts at Goldman, which then opened the doors that it opened for me. But having said that graduates, literally undergraduate students in colleges today can directly apply to private equity firms and it's much more mature, it's much more diversified to the point of if you think you are into thinking about turnarounds and restructuring, there's firms dedicated to doing nothing but restructuring. If you think you are much more of the earlier stage, visionary thinking about big bold ideas, it's earlier stage, angel, pre-seed, venture capital. So literally even just in the private equity spectrum, talking about angel investing, venture capital, growth equity, buyout, late stage restructuring, there's massive pockets within just private equity which sits under finance today that have tremendous career options. So what I would offer to you as you're thinking about making switches within finance, whether it's retail or workplace or how you're thinking about institutional and the like, I would encourage you to think about what is it that you spike in? So where is your strength? And is the area you're going into number one large enough and growing enough where you think you can bet on your skills to go thrive in that environment and it's worth your while to go make that effort, right? So I'd encourage you to perhaps seek people who are working in the area you wanna transfer to and be able to network and just be able to sit down and have conversations around, here's my work experience from area X. How would that actually set me up for success to transition to area Y or be challenging? So at least you're aware of what the pros and cons of being able to make such a transition. Great, that's, I'm sure that's very helpful advice. I'm still gonna invite more questions. The questions are a little slow coming, but as I said, plenty of mine. So I, you know, we may have some faculty members tuned in and I'm wondering if there was an, I heard at least one faculty member mentioned, I think it was you, Farah, who said you took a course with Jim Hartley in economics. I don't know whether there are any of the faculty that you were working with, Monica, still on the campus. Though Professor Hartley is certainly still active here at Mount Holyoke, I'm wondering though, whether it was a faculty person or some other person, maybe a fellow student or staff person that you might have gotten to know if there was someone who really inspired you as part of the Mount Holyoke community. You know, for me, I was fortunate enough, my older sister went to Mount Holyoke, Mara, who's class of 84. And luckily for me, as a result of that, I knew a lot of her friends. I had spent a lot of time at Mount Holyoke. And during a time where the CDC right now has been built up to be something that it wasn't necessarily as large and, you know, supportive and the network was there, wasn't as large when I was at Mount Holyoke. And so I leaned on the alum community back then and they really helped me and gave me some internships, like during Jan term or in the summer. And working with them was great because there was, for me, there was a comfort level. They had gone through Mount Holyoke. They were in the workforce. You know, you're sometimes you're intimidated by that new boss or whoever it is, but I felt comfortable with them. And they gave me some hard feedback. You know, I would give them a writing sample and they would be saying, this is really just not up to par. You need to go back. You know, there's a lot of red lines on doing that. So working with the alums that I was able to work with and interact with was really helpful. And even really my support group of friends who I graduated with, I luckily have a lot of friends from who graduated a year or two either ahead of me or behind me that I'm still close with. And I really leaned on them at different times to help me out to, you know, listen to how would you handle this or have you ever had this happen before or just, you know, a therapy session that you really needed? So most of them, my big professors that influenced me at the time was Curtis Smith who's no longer there in the biology department and then Will Millard in the psychology department. Those were probably my two on campus biggest influences. And I would say like Monica, I had a sibling also but a younger sister, Homa Khan. She was a few years behind me and I wish she had the same gratitude that you do for your older sister, Monica. But she actually, she ended up studying computer science in Asian studies and is now a force to be reckoned with in the technology world. And frankly, for me, much like you too, Monica, my classmates who continue to be part of my personal advisory board who have helped me not only through a lot of professional challenges but also personal setbacks and challenges and just be a good sounding board, right? So in addition to the fantastic professors that I did mention, Professor Hartley and Professor Eva Paus who at one point ran the leadership center who was also a big role model and source of inspiration for me to just continue to go bet myself and kind of be uncomfortable and go test out new areas and the like, right? So whether it's the professors, whether it's our classmates, siblings, frankly my own family has been a tremendous area of support for me along the way. But the one other thing was writing center. I think, you know, I availed of that during my time at the school. And since graduation, my two close friends, Asha Besegra and Shanti Devakar have become my personal writing center members even after graduation. That's great. It's great to know that that peer support continues. As we get ready to wrap up, I'm wondering whether, you know we are thinking about the future of the college and we're in a period of strategic planning. One of the things that we are certainly talking about is how we can strengthen the connection between what people are learning in the classroom, the curriculum to their career trajectory, that pathway from curriculum to career. And this conversation of course is illustrative of the importance of those skills that are fundamental to the liberal arts. Being able to write well, being able to solve problems, think critically, to be able to orate, as you said, Monica, to be able to, you know, speak clearly and explain your ideas to someone else who may or may not be familiar with what you're talking about. All of that is foundational to what we hope our students are learning here. Internship, Farah, you mentioned the importance of internships and, you know, opened that door for you in the world of finance. Monica, I didn't hear you specifically reference an internship. I'm wondering, did you do internships while you were a student here? I did, but they weren't in finance. They were in a couple of different, they weren't in finance directly. They were more in financial roles at other places. Like I worked for the state of Massachusetts. I worked for the Arnold Arboretum and things like that, doing financial work, but behind the scenes. Got it. Even as you say that, you know, sometimes the benefit of an internship is learning you don't like that job. That's very true. Knowing that, you know, sort of pointing you will, you might have thought you wanted to do something and I'm just coming to understand. No, it's exactly, you know, it's not enough people contact or it's not exactly what I had in mind. So that can be a valuable learning as well. Bev, I had one other thing to add that I forgot which was something that again, my brother had sort of put this in my head, which I took advantage of as did my sister, which was all the leadership activities and clubs on campus and all the different offerings, whether it's sports or West African dance. I mean, he literally said to me, sign up for at least one class every semester that you wouldn't be able to go do or learn, you know, after the fact, right? So it was literally whether it's West African dancing, whether it's public speaking, whether it's student government, I took advantage of all of those which frankly, again, really helped me from a communication perspective, being able to go explore and do things that performed to me that I wouldn't be able to do. Otherwise it really also is an important part of not just your academic classroom experience but outside of the classroom experience that to me was a tremendous resource in pushing my boundaries. Well, we have a comment in our Q&A which is not a question, but I want to share it since you mentioned your sister Farah says just a comment, so good to see Farah. I was a transfer student, so I missed Farah on campus but overlapped with her sister Huma. She was a source of inspiration even then and I followed her footsteps to Goldman. So I think. I remember. Yes, so there you have it. Any last thoughts you'd like to share before we bring our conversation to a close? Perhaps I just, you know, Beth, thank you again for taking this on and having this conversation with Monica and I really, we wanted to use this as a way to remind our students or alumni, this is, you know, finance is a big complicated landscape and one with a ton of super exciting career opportunities whether they're focused in the US or in international markets around the world. So I just want to make sure that you feel emboldened to be open-minded to give it a thought whether it's the public area, the private area, whether it's out facing clients, being in an investor position or in support. There's a lot of different paths to success and I would really encourage you to think about that. And again, through the Career Development Center if you find ways to avail of internship opportunities to see if you like or don't like a potential career path I'd really encourage you if I can with this conversation to see and explore those possible paths. Great. And I think I just to add on to that Beverly that it's okay to take risks. You know, sometimes they work and sometimes they don't and finance, there's so many the broad term finance applies to so many different things. You could be, you know, finance and work at the Bill Gates Foundation because you're working on whatever they're making money and making investments in different charities. You can work at Google, you can work at Twitter there's finance on so many different levels. You know, there's real estate which we haven't even really talked about or other areas or even within finance far was more on the investment side and I was more on what they generally refer to as the operational side. But even under that, there's trading there's operations, there's the treasury area there's compliance, there is fundraising there's the legal side of things from because you have to deal with the DOJ or the SEC or all the regulatory agencies. So there's a multiple, you know variety of options within finance that are opportunities out there. And, you know, Mount Holyoke gives you the foundation to explore those whether or not you want to go to business school directly and be on that side or become a lawyer or whatever area you're going to pursue. And in the world of finance especially even at Farrell on my old company used to be very defined of you needed an MBA from Harvard or Stanford or Penn in order to go there. But there are different areas we're hiring a lot of PhDs in cellular biology because we're looking at healthcare companies and we want to know how those things are going through. There's a whole area of data labs. So anybody in the computer science world who understands data and statistics of looking at those things and how to crunch data. The world of how investments happen is rapidly changing and evolving as when Fara started out like the only thing that's consistent is change. So, you know those skills are just still being honed and developed. So there's a lot of opportunities in the space of people want to explore it. Well, I want to take this opportunity to thank you both. It's been really great to have this conversation with you. And I want to say that for students who are interested in exploring careers in finance please feel free to self-schedule in handshake or call 413-538-2080 for scheduling assistance to meet with a career advisor. That comment comes from Roshanda DeGranfri who is a member of our CDC team. Thank you Roshanda for sharing that information. And if we were all in person we would give you a round of applause but I just want to say thank you so much for being with us this afternoon and thank you for all of those who tuned in. We had a great audience and looking forward to our next launching leadership series interview in just a few weeks. Thanks so much to you both.