Bernardo Barron
Major: Canfield BHP, Quantitative Finance, Risk Management Certificate
Topics of Interest: Finance, Real Estate, Commodity Trading, Latin America
After deciding he wanted to be surrounded by an environment that fosters growth in his academic life and then later, being admitted into two different competitive academic programs at UT like the Cockrell School of Engineering and the Canfield Business Honors Program, senior Bernardo Barron made the momentous call to enroll at Canfield BHP.
When Bernardo got to UT he was an undeclared student and like many of our freshmen, did not know what he wanted to pursue but Bernardo had bigger goals in mind and ultimately decided business was the academic route for him. Bernardo explained, “it was more about the decision of how I wanted to pursue college. Canfield BHP (CBHP) was a must for me, because of the people around me and really, the environment at CBHP that incentivized that academic growth.”
Keeping busy is something Bernardo enjoys and like a lot of our students in the program, he is quite competitive. Bernardo has been busy at work lining up his internships over the years and now he knows what he has in store for the next two, working at Citibank in Houston in its two-year rotational program.
“I’m going to be doing commodity trading at Citibank and that’s a two-year rotational program and one of the cool things that they have there is their Latin American desk in Houston.”
With plans to work in the Latin American market soon, Bernardo says, “I think it would be awesome to work throughout all of Latin America, to trade agricultural goods and precious metals while flexing and working out my language skills, and hopefully even expanding into Portuguese.”
Ever the adventurous and spontaneous type, Bernardo sees many opportunities in Latin America as he thinks about the future.
“If there’s an opportunity that shows up that I don’t expect, I’m not afraid to jump into something that I’m passionate about”, Bernardo said.
Bernardo recently got the opportunity to work in real estate at a private equity firm for a family office last summer. With COVID safety protocols in place, Bernardo had the pleasure to work with people who had decades of experience in the real estate industry.
“Like CBHP, I just love being around knowledgeable people and learning from them. What we were focused on was converting different properties into climate-controlled self-storage units. That was my area of focus and I was doing a lot of due diligence and market research to try to find some properties that fit the correct characteristics that we were looking for such as certain levels of population income, how many families and people rent in the area, and several different metrics to find where there were opportunities to expand in the climate-controlled self-storage industry.”
One of the reasons Bernardo is so passionate about real estate is because he believes creating a passive income and figuring out how to deploy capital in the long term can help set you on the path to financial success in the future, something he plans to achieve.
“To become financially free as a lot of people like to say, I think that’s a great thing, and understanding the (real estate) industry is important for that”, he said.
Bernardo’s biggest takeaway from this internship was realizing that doing more and finding ways to contribute that are not stated specifically by your superiors is a great way to stand out.
“Try to find ways to work on a project or find a way to do the due diligence that is better than the current system and implement things that will make the future processes better”, he said.
Making things like mundane or redundant systems more efficient to use are just a few ways to make life easier on yourself at work but Bernardo also likes to throw in a positive and enthusiastic attitude in everything he does on top of that.
Bernardo explains, “what makes my time and everything I do so much better is that I keep a positive attitude and I stay enthusiastic about what I do, whether that be school or work. It’s your perception of what you’re doing that is going to result in how you experience it. I just love having a positive outlook, love to manage my work and life, and find balance. I think that shows and I think that makes people want to work with me more. I believe just showing happiness radiates (positive) energy, and that improves the work environment.”