Morgan Stanley, part 1 of 1
Choosing what came after Morgan Stanley
I could have kept working there. I chose a different kind of work.
Context
In fall 2025 I worked at Morgan Stanley as an off-cycle analyst in Investment Management, alongside my classes. Like Piermont, the role came from a relationship that started with a freshman-year cold email.
The problem
The team spent a lot of time on work that repeated every week. Weekly reporting meant pulling portfolio data from an internal platform by hand. Due diligence research meant checking the same kinds of sources again and again for every project.
What I did
- Automated the weekly report. I built an Excel tool that pulled portfolio data from the internal platform automatically. Weekly reporting for the six-person team went from about two hours to fifteen minutes.
- Built a research tool. I built a research tool that used a language model across more than ten data sources. It saved analysts about fifteen hours a week and supported more than five due diligence projects every week.
- Found something nobody had intended. Looking across more than ten equity portfolios, I found more than $12 million of exposure concentrated in one sector that no one had chosen on purpose. I helped the team work through the rebalancing decision.
What I learned
The more time I spent in finance, the clearer two things became. I wanted to learn how a business works as a whole, not execute one part of it. And I eventually want to own one.
I had the chance to keep working at Morgan Stanley the following spring and summer. I chose not to. Instead I went to an early-stage startup, where I would be close to operations and strategy every day, and where there wasn’t a role yet for what I wanted to do, so I proposed one.