MBAs Doing Great Things: For This Wharton Student, Financial Literacy Was A Path To Independence

From a young age, Memi Kirikoglu knew she wanted to be a part of the business world.

At a school fair, she would try to come up with new marketing tactics to increase sales of her homemade bracelets. She’d put on pencil skirts and walk around her house, imagining herself walking through an office building someday. “I just always wanted to become a businesswoman,” she says.

Now 27, Kirikoglu is getting ready to leave New York and her job at one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Bridgewater Associates, to head to Philadelphia — where she will be attending The Wharton School in the fall. But while she’s known what she wanted to be since she was young and has found great success along the way, her path wasn’t simple.

GROWING UP IN A CULTURE WHERE INDEPENDENCE IS RARE FOR WOMEN

Growing up in Istanbul, Turkey, Kirikoglu noticed how people expected different things of her than her brother. She soon realized how different societal expectations and opportunities were for women than men. In Turkey, it’s rare for women to be financially independent, Kirikoglu explains. “We raise girls to become dependents,” she says.

Kirikoglu describes how her grandmother — “the smartest one in the family” — wasn’t allowed to attend middle school, much less earn money or handle any finances for the family. When Kirikoglu’s grandfather passed away, however, the financial responsibilities fell to her grandmother and she was more than up to the task.

“She was so capable,” Kirikoglu says. “She was just never allowed to do those things. And I think she always felt the regret of like, ‘I wish I went to school. I wish I was allowed to get a driver’s license.’”

‘I HAD TO FIGURE OUT A WAY OUT’

Kirikoglu says these gender roles were passed down to her parents; her father was the owner of the family while her mother was “very much beholden to him.” Seeing how the maternal figures she idolized couldn’t be independent because of restrictive expectations for women motivated her to look for a different path.

“I had to figure out a way out … so that I could build my own life separately,” she explains.

At 13, she started looking into international boarding schools. She received an academic scholarship to attend Ashbury College, a preparatory school in Ottawa, Canada, where she learned English and eventually served on the school’s Board of Advisors as the sole student member. Upon graduating, she moved to the United States to attend the University of California-Berkeley.

Kirikoglu completed a yearlong internship at the Wall Street Journal while in college and graduated with a double major in Economics and Computer Science. She was then recruited to work for Bridgewater Associates, where she has spent the last five and a half years. Bridgewater’s focus on educating their employees attracted Kirikoglu, “because I wanted to learn the principles of markets and economies. Because what I truly believed was the path to an independent life was through financial independence. If I could earn my own money, then I could make my own decisions in the ways that my mom or my grandma weren’t allowed to.”

She started in a management position at Bridgewater as the Chief of Staff to the CEO. After a few years, she started taking investment classes offered by the company and eventually joined the team responsible for institutional global business development partnering with clients and prospects. At the same time, Kirikoglu was finding ways to help more women and girls become financially literate and escape cycles of poverty and economic dependency.

“I was fortunate enough to get to pursue academics and I was fortunate enough to land a great job,” she says. “And very quickly, my focus turned to ‘How do I ensure other women get to do this?’”

TEACHING FINANCIAL LITERACY TO GIRLS

When it comes to financial control and responsibility, Kirikoglu says gender imbalance is less dramatic in the United States than in Turkey, but it is still a significant problem. She cites the fact that women own just 32 cents of wealth for every dollar men own in the U.S., even though women make up roughly half of the American workforce. And the problem goes beyond gender, she notes, explaining that financial literacy among teens is low across the board. A 2021 study found that 75% of American teenagers have low confidence in their personal finance knowledge.

This is a serious problem, she says, considering that many people start taking out student loans at age 17 or 18, and get their first credit card around the same time. Kirikoglu says that when she got her first credit card, she didn’t understand fundamental concepts like debt and interest rates. “We have to deal with money,” she says, “and people aren’t teaching you what to do with it.”

While working at Bridgewater, Kirikoglu got involved with the Council for Economic Education, where she now serves on the board as an associate member. Since 2021, she has been a mentor for Invest In Girls, a Council for Economic Education program that aims to promote financial literacy for girls and increase the number of women in finance fields. Kirikoglu regularly teaches classes to dozens of high school girls in New York City about finance and economic decision-making. She says that most of her students come from underserved communities, which means they are less likely to have access to resources to help them understand finances and get advice on how to manage their money. Studies show clear racial and ethnic disparities in financial literacy and have found this to be one of the many structural factors that drive the racial wealth gap in the United States.

In her classes, she answers questions that may seem simple, but are often mystifying to young people: “‘What do I do with $1? Do I put it into my bank account? Do I invest it or do I spend it?’ Questions that are very real and no one ever teaches us,” she says, adding that most states don’t require students to take a personal finance class to graduate.

MISSION: PROMOTING FINANCIAL LITERACY ON A GLOBAL SCALE

Though she’d found success at Bridgewater, Kirikoglu knew she wanted to take her career further: “Very quickly, I realized that you don’t come this far just to come this far.” She decided to start applying to MBA programs. “I wanted to go to business school because I wanted to be surrounded by other people who were focused on improving themselves and were ambitious and wanted to continue their own learning journey. And Wharton felt like the clear, obvious choice,” she says. She was also attracted to Wharton’s status as a top-ranked school for finance. “My goal is to be dangerous and finance and stop the cycle of being underestimated,” she says.

But getting an MBA at Wharton is about more than just her own career goals. “Wharton was a clear path to both credentialing myself but also helping support women’s equality,” she says, explaining that she wants to become a leader in finance and create a cycle of uplifting women and increasing female representation in a sector where only 15% of C-suite executives are women. She also hopes to find ways to make financial education digitally accessible for all, though she’s not sure exactly what that will look like yet — “If you have ideas, I’d love to hear them,” she said with a laugh.

Promoting financial education on a global scale is Kirikoglu’s long-term mission: She feels that succeeding in private industry will likely be necessary for her to achieve this goal. By becoming a leader in the finance industry herself, she hopes to be able to continue working with forums like the Council for Economic Education and “create the space and opportunity for industry leaders to engage with people who otherwise wouldn’t gain access to them.”

Ultimately, she would like to return to Turkey and help create positive changes and progress in her home country. She talks about Hafize Gaye Erkan, who has held positions as a senior executive at Goldman Sachs and the co-CEO and president of First Republic Bank and recently became the first woman to head Turkey’s central bank when she was appointed by the country’s president in early June.

“A dream of mine is to be able to serve my country in that way and promote not only economic advancement but also economic education for the entire population,” Kirikoglu says. “The goal is to be able to eventually go back and make things available that weren’t available to my mom and my grandma.”

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