Photo Courtesy of Aoife Maher Ryan

“I really wanted to graduate [from] high school early, [but] the earliest I could do it was one semester before my expected graduation. I really hated high school – it was the worst – [and] I had to get my parents’ permission [to graduate early but] my dad said I was only allowed to graduate high school a semester early if I went to college right away. Since my family was already moving to Long Island, New York, from Kansas, I decided to start looking at schools around here that would take me, and Hofstra did. People are a lot more talkative in New York [and] everyone wants to interact more, but they’re also more aggressive. I’m now a junior finance major and I’m planning to get my MBA with the five-year program here and then I’m probably going to get an entry-level financial planning and analysis job right out of college and then grow from there. My last internship wasn’t very good because all they had me do was put stuff in Excel and I never really learned anything. I interviewed for a different one this week, so I hope to get [a] more hands-on experience and increase my connections with that. Right now, I’m in the Hofstra hedge fund association, where we mock sell and trade stocks and commodities. We evaluate companies and talk about what’s going on in the current marketplace. It’s interactive and has let me get to know other people in the business school outside of classes. Since joining the program, I have realized that I really enjoy studying finance. It gives you the feel of realistic situations you would encounter in a professional workplace. The long-term goal is to start my own hedge fund, or I might start a company with my roommate, Lukas. There are a lot of options ahead of me.”