Hannah Greene

UCLA, Anderson School of Management

“I’m American / British so I can cheerlead or be cynical depending on the situation.”

Hometown: London, UK

Fun fact about yourself: I have a first cousin named Hannah Greene. She’s two weeks older than I am and also left-handed. Our grandparents have been confused for 30 years.

Undergraduate School and Degree: University of Virginia, Bachelor of Arts (History)

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Artisan Partners, Associate Director, Europe Middle East & Africa (EMEA) Distribution team in London

Where did you intern during the summer of 2018? Capital Group, Los Angeles

Where will you be working after graduation? Capital Group, Los Angeles, as a Fixed Income Analyst

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

Leadership Roles & Involvement

President of the Anderson Investment Association (AIA), sub-division of the Investment Finance Association (the main finance club on campus)

Anderson Career Team (ACT) coach; coach first-year students for interviews

Anderson Admissions Ambassador; interview prospective students and host information sessions

Student Investment Fund Fellow; 1 of 10 students selected to manage a portion of UCLA’s endowment

Scholarships

Kayne Investment Management Fellow; this connected me with 3 investment management alumni in LA

Forté Fellow

Charles E. Davidson Investment Management Fellowship

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? I’m proud to be one of 10 fellows on Anderson’s Student Investment Fund (SIF). SIF has given me tangible investment experience and taught me the first lesson of my investment career: always review and test my thesis for owning a stock. I’ve also learned a tremendous amount from my classmates in SIF. I’m lucky to have a group of peers, a professor, and a group of incredible advisors whom I can pitch investment ideas to, get feedback from, and also learn from their investment experiences. It’s been the most fun and rewarding experience that I’ve had at Anderson.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? I’m most proud of my successful switch from the distribution side of investment management to fixed income research. Coming into Anderson, I targeted roles in equity research first because I had worked with equity strategies at Artisan Partners. However, there were also opportunities for fixed income. The more I studied the fixed income markets, the more I thought I was better suited to the asset class. I’m proud that I secured an internship at Capital Group in fixed income research. I loved the work over the summer and being offered a full-time job after graduation.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? Eric Sussman, who teaches a popular accounting class, Corporate Financial Reporting. Professor Sussman’s classes are engaging, full of key takeaways about different business models, and fun. In other words, it’s not a typical accounting class. He really wants his students to understand how to read a 10-k without getting fooled by what the company management wants you to think. I’ve already applied what I’ve learned in his class to my investments in the Student Investment Fund and know that it will be useful throughout my career.

What was your favorite MBA Course? My favorite MBA course was Professor Stuart Gabriel’s Real Estate Securitization class. His course is about how different economies handled economic crises (Japan, Europe, and the US), and how the crises and the real estate markets are linked. Through our discussions about the central banks, I learned how differently everyone viewed what should or should not have been done in response to the crisis. I noted how often my classmates’ views differed based on where they were from and their experience pre/post- business school. It reminded me that throughout my career, I will encounter different opinions from my colleagues and it’s in these moments that I will learn the most.

Why did you choose this business school? I chose Anderson for three reasons. First, I wanted to live somewhere new and California had always been at the top of my list. Second, Anderson’s culture of sharing success appealed to me. I have never enjoyed cut-throat cultures, so the idea of a business school where people work together, even though they may be competing for the same jobs, made a lot of sense. Third, Anderson has great resources for people looking for careers in investment management, like the Student Investment Fund and the Kayne Investment Management Fellowship. Anderson offered exactly what I was looking for in an MBA program.

What is your best advice to an applicant hoping to get into your school’s MBA program? Try to talk to a current student who is pursuing a career that you are interested in so that you can articulate clearly why you want to go to Anderson, with specific examples.

What is the biggest myth about your school? Coming from London, I was expecting everyone to be straight out of Clueless and The OC and be skateboarding, surfing and saying “dude” a lot. This is only half-true. While Anderson does have a laid- back California vibe, the students still go to school, wear suits (when necessary), and are extremely driven and fun.

Think back two years ago. What is the one thing you wish you’d known before starting your MBA program? I wish I had known how much fun I was going to have. Before starting my MBA, I was nervous that I would never get a job. It may have been a slightly irrational fear, but my decision to leave my job and move 6,000 miles to get an MBA also seemed irrational. I was so focused on worrying about internships that I didn’t factor in the possibility that I would love living in LA, meet so many new friends, and have so much fun.

MBA Alumni often describe business school as transformative. Looking back over the past two years, how has business school been transformative for you? Business school has allowed me to pivot from distribution to investing; this pivot has transformed my career. While I’ve only spent a summer as an investment analyst, I cannot wait to get started at Capital Group to learn how to be an investor and begin my investment career. I could not have achieved this without going to business school.

From a personal standpoint, I have a different life. I live in a new city where the sun shines 80% (or more) of the year and I can eat good tacos and sushi any time. I’ve met a group of friends whose interests and goals are wide-ranging and inspiring. And, most importantly, I hope that I’ve gained a new perspective by living in a different part of the world and exposing myself to new experiences, inside and outside of the classroom.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? I admire Brianna Hammer. She’s a great friend of mine and is going to work in tech investment banking at Qatalyst after Anderson. She is one of the most hard-working people I have met at Anderson, always positive and ready to accept any challenge. I can’t wait to see what she will do with her career after we graduate.

Who most influenced your decision to pursue business in college? My father grew up in Boston and completed his MBA at Rice University in Houston. He always said that the biggest lessons he learned there were that business is not complicated and that it is possible to love living in Texas. His career – and the way he taught my sisters and me about the business world – proved that he must have learned something from his MBA classes. However, I also realized that the biggest lessons can come from simply living somewhere new and gaining perspective as a result. That insight has influenced my decisions, when I have had the choice, to live in new places such as Charlottesville for my time at UVA and Milwaukee for my first job at Artisan Partners.

I was drawn to pursue an MBA because it was the quickest and most direct way to achieve my career goal of becoming an investment analyst. The Anderson MBA gave me both an opportunity to gain perspective from another new place, Los Angeles, and the ability to change the direction of my career.

What is your favorite movie about business? Trading Places. I learned that Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd are acting geniuses and that commodities traders buy and sell frozen concentrated orange juice. More importantly, it’s a great movie that highlights the importance of luck in determining your position and success in the world.

What was the goofiest MBA term or acronym you encountered – and what did it mean? AA: Anderson Afternoons (not Alcoholics Anonymous!). It’s a gathering on campus for all the students every Thursday afternoon and is often sponsored by the clubs. We drink beer and wine at AA.

“If I hadn’t gone to business school, I would be…in London, hopefully still working for my previous firm, Artisan Partners, building new client relationships in the UK and Ireland.”

What dollar value would you place on your MBA education? Was it worth what you paid for it – worth more or worthless? As a future fixed income investor, I’m inclined to focus on the downside. My MBA cost me my 2 years of foregone income from my previous role plus tuition, and I had to bet on myself to get a new job in a function I had never worked in before. It was a high-risk investment that will be worth far more than what I paid for it.

The main value has been to change my career trajectory. I could not have done that without coming to business school. I also live in a new city on the other side of the world, I’ve made great new friends and traveled to Japan with classmates from Japan. These are all experiences I would not have had without coming to Anderson.

What are the top two items on your bucket list?

Travel to China with a business school professor (to be completed over Spring Break).

See the Northern Lights.

In one sentence, how would you like your peers to remember you? Please remember me as thoughtful, happy and fun.

Hobbies? Skiing, tennis, reading

What made Hannah such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2019?

“I have enjoyed working with Hannah over the past two years. She came into school with quite a bit of knowledge about investment management, which differentiated her from some of her peers almost immediately. She wanted to make the transition from the client side to the research side, which is difficult, but from my first few meetings with her, I knew it would be something she could absolutely accomplish!  From the beginning, I found that Hannah could come into a meeting having made significant progress from the previous time we’d met. She’d ask great questions and readily take advice. She’d then leave and follow through on prescribed next steps. I asked Hannah to be one of the Days on the Job leaders, interacting with investment management firms to get them to agree to host Anderson students. I knew I could rely on her to make sure that the trip was efficiently organized, a great learning experience, and lots of fun, which it was!

Hannah also realized early that entering stock pitch competitions were going to be a great way to come up the learning curve. So she entered one and was undaunted by how difficult it was, and she used the first competition to teach her how to be much better in the second. The competitions got her noticed by recruiters and investment managers attending these conferences, which resulted in a number of invitations for her to interview. She received a few offers, but she ultimately decided to go to Capital Group in a fixed income research role. This was UCLA Anderson’s pioneer in Capital’s fixed-income group, which was incredibly exciting and for which we are extremely proud!

After she succeeded in recruiting, she was chosen to run the Anderson Investment Association. In this role, she has moved investment management forward at Anderson with our investment conference, a fixed income pitch competition, and her coaching of first years. The first years have found her both approachable and helpful. As a result of her great guidance and coaching, we have gotten our second Anderson student into Capital Group this year. Hannah was also selected to the Student Investment Fund, a very prestigious and exclusive group chosen to manage $2M of UCLA’s endowment.

I am grateful for Hannah’s great performance in school and recruiting as well as her leadership of the Investment Management Club.”

Regina Regazzi

Assistant Dean & Director, Parker Career Management Center

UCLA Anderson

 

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