Monthly Archives: October 2020

Canfield BHP Alum Ashish Gupta Shares Investment Banking, Impact Investing Experiences

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From equity research to portfolio management to owning his own hedge fund, since graduating from UT with degrees in Canfield BHP and Finance in 2000, Ashish Gupta has become a pro in the investment and startup sectors. Today, he continues to give back to the university. 

In addition to serving as an advisor for Canfield BHP, the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship, and the Sustainability Investment Group, Ashish works for 4Told FinTech, a microlending technology company, as the Chief Financial Officer. He also runs his own family practice that exclusively invests in impact-oriented, early-stage companies. Prior to this, Ashish worked in various roles within the financial sector.

“For about 15 years, I spent my life in the area of finance. Initially, (I worked) as an investment banker and equity researcher primarily focusing on the energy sector. Then, I transitioned from the sell-side to the buy-side, working at a couple of hedge funds and (later) was a partner at a startup hedge fund in New York and helped grow that to nearly a billion dollars (of assets) under management,” Ashish said.

After growing the startup hedge fund, Ashish went on to found his own hedge fund that invested in publicly traded equities within the energy sector. Throughout his career, Ashish said non-profit work and giving back to his communities was also incredibly important to him. Ultimately, this led him to combine his passions for finance and social impact.

“All along that time, whether I was doing investment banking or working in the hedge fund world, the personal aspect of my life was focused on philanthropy and impact, largely in the area of education and access to capital,” he said. “When I strung together a few good years in the hedge fund world, I wasn’t feeling personally fulfilled and wanted to focus more of my time exclusively on areas of impact. In 2018 I sold my hedge fund and, for the last three years, I’ve been focused on impact investing.”

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Alumni Spotlight: Maya Josiam

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Maya Josiam Headshot

Canfield BHP alum, Maya Josiam, graduated in May 2018 with her degree in Finance. After graduating, Maya started working in Dallas as a management consultant at Oliver Wyman, where she focused on cases across a variety of industries ranging from manufacturing and financial services to education. It was there in the education space that Maya further fueled her passion for education. Nowadays, Maya is a middle school math teacher and full-time student pursuing her master’s degree. We caught up with Maya to hear more about her transition.

 “I was actually at Oliver Wyman for almost two years. I started in 2018 and left at the end of June, this past year, to start a master’s program in teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Currently, while enrolled in that full-time master’s program, I am also an apprentice teacher, which is just fancy talk for being a student-teacher at a Philadelphia middle school, where I teach sixth grade math and science.”

What helped to inspire you to make the pivot to education and become a teacher?

The education practice at Oliver Wyman really does a lot of different things across education, all the way from pre-K through college and even things like professional education and vocational education. I had done a lot of work and a ton of different projects across the education space in my second year. 

The pivot to education, for me, has been a long time coming. Even when I was at UT, I spent a lot of time working in the UTeach Outreach program, which is an awesome education program that UT has on campus. All of my internship experience was in the education space, and I knew long term that I wanted to work in education. After doing two years of consulting, and after a year of that time being in the education space, it felt like the right time to make a career transition into a more direct form of education, which for me, was teaching. I knew if I wanted to do anything in the larger education space outside of consulting, I needed to be a teacher first. The way I decided to pursue becoming a teacher was getting certified through a master’s degree program where I would also have the ability to teach in a real classroom. Continue reading

Halloween Throwback: Canfield BHP Seniors + Their Costumes

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Choosing costumes, decorating pumpkins, and enjoying a spooky 31st with friends brings joy to students throughout the university, but, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, Halloween might look a bit different this year. With socially-distanced Halloween festivities approaching, now is a great time to look back on some of the fun Canfield BHP seniors have had over the years. 

Carlyn and Josh as Drake and Josh

Carlyn Crow, a Canfield BHP, Plan II senior, and Josh Jones, a Canfield BHP, Computational Engineering senior, showed out on October 31st as the iconic duo of Drake and Josh. As one of the last classes to have 90s babies, it only makes sense that this Canfield BHPair chose to dress as the main characters of a beloved Nickelodeon sitcom released in the early 2000s. 

Bernardo and Lindsey as Bunnies

No Halloween is complete without a couple of animal costumes and the Canfield BHP community certainly did not disappoint. Canfield BHP, Finance senior Bernardo Barron, and Canfield BHP, Accounting senior Lindsey Hoyer hopped into Halloween last year in full bunny suits. 

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Internship Spotlight: Sanika Bhave

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Name: Sanika Bhave

Major: Canfield BHP, Plan II Honors, Management Information Systems 

Previous internship: Venture Capital Intern at Crosscut Ventures

Topics of Interest: clean tech, social entrepreneurship, intellectual property law, art history

For students interested in the intersection of business, technology, and social good, Sanika Bhave is a student worth learning from. As a Venture Capital Intern at Crosscut ventures, Sanika had the opportunity to spearhead various projects, from developing LA’s first free regional tech job board to helping run a social impact fund. 

Crosscut is an early-stage fund based out of Santa Monica, California. Because of the pandemic, Sanika worked remotely, but still had the opportunity to learn from leadership and develop skills throughout her summer.

“I worked under Nick Kim, who is the head of platform (at Crosscut),” she said. “Part of what I did was help spearhead Crosscut’s platform initiatives, like making sure our mission, what we stand for, and our past successes are known to the broader tech community.” 

One of the projects she worked on was something called Interchange, LA’s first free regional tech job board. Sanika said the idea behind Interchange was to reduce barriers to entry in the area.

“Silicon Beach is very much a real thing, and we want to retain top tech talent in LA, but also attract people to come to live there,” Sanika said. “The launch of Interchange was really cool. There’s no paywall, no barriers– whether it be income, racial background education, etc. Now (everyone has) a fair shot at being employed by the best and brightest. Working on that was really cool.”

In addition to working on Interchange, Sanika had the opportunity to interact with founders through Crosscut Connect, the central repository used to provide founders support. 

“Last week we had a webinar with Brian Makita, who is the head of performance marketing at Warby Parker,” Sanika said. “We also talked with art portfolio companies and marketing departments about how performance marketing has evolved at Warby Parker since COVID and how those strategies might apply to our portfolios as well.”

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