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BY LORI JOHNSTON (ABJ ‘95)
BULLISH
ABOUT
BULLDOGS
WALL STREET WARMS UP TO UGA
STUDENTS THANKS TO
AND THE
DAVID BATTLE
CORSAIR SOCIETY
T
JEREMY BALES (AB, ABJ ’01)
David Battle, principal at Metalmark Capital and co-founder of the Corsair
Society, poses in New York City’s Financial District. The Corsair Society helps
UGA students prepare to compete for internships—that may lead to jobs—in
investment banking.
he Statue of Liberty looms in
the distance through the floorto-ceiling windows on the 27th
floor of Citi’s Greenwich Street
offices in the Tribeca neighborhood of
Lower Manhattan. Bethany McCain (AB,
AB ’13), surrounded by fellow University of
Georgia alumni, takes a final few moments
to savor the view of the Hudson River before
she and the others head off to their jobs at
Citi, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs and other
investment bank and private equity firms.
The 30-plus professionals gathering for
this mini reunion in early September are
among more than 100 recent UGA graduates
who have earned jobs at top-tier investment
banks and management consulting firms
through their participation in the Corsair
Society.
The Corsair Society is a student- and
alumni-led organization sponsored and
supported by the UGA Honors Program,
which collaborates with the Terry College
of Business and other parts of the university.
Founded as a small, informal group in 2006,
the organization’s participants have been
earning positions and excelling on Wall
Street and in some of the most competitive
jobs in the business world.
DECEMBER 2014 • GEORGIA MAGAZINE
21
THE 2014 AND 2015 CORSAIR SOCIETY MEMBERS HAVE EARNED INTERNSHIPS AND FULL-TIME
David Williams, associate provost and director of the Honors Program, speaks
at a September reunion of Corsair participants in New York.
“It still kind of takes my breath away that we have
these kinds of opportunities,” says McCain, a UGA
Foundation Fellow who works for J.P. Morgan, part
of JPMorgan Chase & Co. “I’m very, very grateful to
Corsair Society for the opportunity to be up here.”
The 16 Corsair members with 2014 internships all
earned job offers as their senior year began.
“The fact that every single person in our class
received an offer is significant, and I’m really proud of
them for that,” says David Battle (BBA ’00), Corsair’s
co-founder. “Participants have been more successful
than anyone involved could have imagined.”
Opening the doors on Wall Street is contributing
to overall success at Terry, where the placement rate
for the class of 2014 grew to 84 percent (up from 50
percent five years ago). The ripple effect is that more
opportunities are available for UGA students.
22 GEORGIA MAGAZINE • www.ugamagazine.uga.edu
JEREMY BALES
“The most challenging, difficult jobs you get, our
students are getting them, and they’re getting them
in scores, and they’re getting them in either London
or New York or San Francisco or wherever,” says
Les Franks (BBA ’89), a managing director at UBS
Investment Bank.
Corsair’s impact on Wall Street and other
financial districts has driven Citi, Goldman Sachs,
J.P. Morgan and McKinsey & Co. to begin traveling
to UGA on recruiting trips. Wes Walraven (BBA ’83),
global head of industrials at Citi, says when UGA
students came to New York on their own dime they
were ready to impress. Corsair is why Citi is recruiting
at UGA this academic year (Duke is the only other
Southern school), in addition to visiting Ivy League
institutions.
“They articulated very well they wanted to be an
investment banker, which is an important question,”
Walraven says. “They had a personality. They had
poise in the interviews.”
JOBS AT SOME OF THE WORLD’S MOST PRESTIGIOUS INVESTMENT BANKING AND PRIVATE
CUTTING A PATH
Corsair originated after Jeff Bogan
(BBA ’02) asked his professor, now
UGA President Jere W. Morehead, to
recommend an alumnus working in
investment banking. Morehead (JD
’80) suggested Battle, who was with
Wachovia in Charlotte, N.C., at the
time.
“I remember when David Battle
and I first discussed this concept,”
Morehead says. “I agreed it was needed
and would benefit our university and,
more importantly, our best and brightest
undergraduates. I have been very
impressed with the speed, breadth and
scope of the group’s success.”
Wall Street was a long shot at the
time, but Charlotte was within reach.
Bogan placed the call.
“I would not have gotten my job
in investment banking if it weren’t for
David,” says Bogan, now head of the
institutional group at Lending Club
in San Francisco. “All he did was have
three one-hour phone calls with me
and it made the difference between me
getting a job and not getting a job.”
Battle, now at Metalmark Capital
in New York, and Bogan began working
with interested students, eventually
partnering with David Williams,
associate provost and director of the
Honors Program.
“We saw the opportunity to provide
a support network for the best students
to help them find and compete for
junior-year internships,” Williams says.
The students have secured
internships and excelled at them,
receiving offers for full-time
employment at a rate Battle and
Williams (AB ’79, MA ’82) describe as
remarkable.
Corsair’s success, Battle says, stems
from preparation and introspection.
Participants start thinking about their
careers and work diligently to develop
technical skills (including research and
financial modeling) through peer and
alumni mentoring that complements
coursework.
“The goal is to make sure they are
more prepared than their competition,”
says an early Corsair supporter, Charles
A. Watson (MBA ’94), managing
director in the Financial Sponsors
Group at William Blair & Company in
Charlotte.
Each fall, seniors fresh off their
internships choose the student applicants
who they think will be the best
candidates in investment banking, sales
and trading, and management consulting
that UGA can offer employers. Corsair
Society 2014 President Sam Kinsman, a
finance major, says his biggest obstacle
was learning to talk about himself in a
way that shows companies how he thinks
and makes decisions.
Andrew Ward (BBA ’07), a member
of the founding class that named the
Society after J.P. Morgan’s yacht,
remembers Battle and Bogan coaching
him on the phone about interview attire
and what questions he should expect.
“It’s amazing to see how far the
organization has come and how much
further it can continue to grow,” says
Ward, senior associate at a private
equity firm in New York. “It doesn’t
take a genius to do what we do, but
it’s all about how prepared you are for
the interview and how you set yourself
apart.”
Until Corsair, UGA students lacked
the “secret sauce”—starting with the
code and lingo—to access interviews
and jobs on Wall Street, says Mike
Ostergard (BBA ’89), managing partner
of Accenture’s health care strategy
practice. As he approached graduation
from Terry, opportunities in investment
banking weren’t available to him.
“UGA kids, as smart as they are,
never had a chance,” Ostergard says.
Vienn Kim (BBA ’11) speaks during the
reunion’s breakfast meeting, hosted by
CitiGroup at the firm’s Greenwich Street offices
in Tribeca.
JEREMY BALES
DECEMBER 2014 • GEORGIA MAGAZINE
23
EQUITY FIRMS, INCLUDING: GOLDMAN SACHS, CITI, UBS, J.P. MORGAN, CREDIT SUISSE,
IN-DEPTH PREPARATION
Starting in the fall, the Corsair senior
leaders meet weekly for hours with the
juniors, as well as some MBA students,
providing instruction and mentoring.
They review research on companies,
knowledge of financial models, résumé
preparation and interview attire. They
conduct mock interviews that help the
students develop concise, yet detailed,
answers.
About halfway through the
semester, Corsair students receive the
coveted list of alumni in investment
banking and private equity who are
willing to give honest—and sometimes
blunt—advice and feedback. Alumni
take a distanced approach, Bogan
says, because they want students to
demonstrate a strong work ethic, which
employers demand. After all, students
will be working more than 40 hours a
week and on little sleep.
“They have to go out of their way
and show initiative. We want it to be
a challenge,” he says. “If we held their
hand the entire time, interviewers would
see right through it. Hard work is the
only way.”
Corsair students already are gifted,
but the group serves as a targeted
training program that provides the
tools to succeed in the interview and
the internship, says David Kirby (BBA,
MAcc ’08), an associate at Goldman
Sachs.
“We have been able to [attract] the
most talented students at Georgia that
are interested in finance to [coach] them
specifically on how to get a job up here.”
Mike Heider (BBA ’13) describes
UGA alumni like Battle and Kirby as his
“LeBron James.”
“I wanted to emulate characteristics
and traits that they had,” says Heider,
who works in the industrials group at
Goldman Sachs.
Instead of mumbling through
phone calls or writing casual emails, the
students learn to employ networking
ANDREW DAVIS TUCKER
Mollie Kinsman (BBA ’08), client services coordinator at Bridgewater Associates, visited
campus in September to speak to the newest Corsair class.
and communication skills used by
professionals. It’s not enough to get the
internship and a job offer, but students
must make sure they are the best they
possibly can be, says Shan Siddiqui (BBA
’14), who interned and works full time
for Citi.
The early Corsair members
paid their way to interviews in New
York, since no Wall Street firms with
investment banking internships were
recruiting at UGA until recently. Now,
the Honors Program sponsors Corsair,
including covering the cost for the
students (both Honors and non-Honors)
to travel to interviews and hosting firms
that recruit on campus.
As former chair of the Terry Dean’s
Advisory Council, Darren DeVore
(BBA ’86) helped Corsair transition
from being run by a passionate group of
alumni to a more formal part of UGA, in
order to increase the number of students
in Corsair and UGA’s overall reputation.
“I’ve always wanted to help
students and young people that want
to do what it takes to succeed,” says
DeVore, managing partner at Broad
24 GEORGIA MAGAZINE • www.ugamagazine.uga.edu
Pine Investments in Atlanta. “We all
have a little bit of a chip on our shoulder,
relative to some schools viewed as more
prominent, and the chip on our shoulder
is, we went to the University of Georgia.
We know we are well trained, and we
are proud of it. We’re out to prove
something.”
In mid-September, moments before
explaining the hours involved in Corsair
to more than 100 students in a standingroom-only Corsair information session
in Sanford Hall, Kinsman beams with
the news that Goldman Sachs has made
him a job offer.
“Not only can our students compete
with the best in the country… but we’re
all being asked to come back as fulltime employees,” he says. “We’re just as
competitive.”
McCain remembers walking
into her interviews, armed with
encouragement from her Corsair peers,
alumni and faculty, such as Terry
professor Chris Cornwell, head of
the department of economics. “I felt
so comfortable and confident.” She
thought, “Why shouldn’t I be here?”
BARCLAYS, DEUTSCHE BANK, MCKINSEY & CO. AND BOSTON CONSULTING GROUP.
LONG-TERM PAYOFF
Williams and Battle believe the organization serves as
a model of alumni engagement that could translate to other
schools and programs, and to jobs around the world. Links
exist between business and media, engineering and other
areas, Battle says.
With the number of alumni working in investment
banking and private equity firms—and spreading to San
Francisco, London, Dubai and Asia—Battle believes the
group could expand to 40 students a year, if they are willing to
put in the effort. For the 2014-15 academic year, Corsair has
its largest class ever, with 24 students.
Prominent alumni from the fields of investment banking,
strategy consulting and industry visit campus to speak at
Terry and to sophomores in the Introduction to Markets
and Enterprises course, which will be offered for the third
time this spring (the Honors course also accepts non-Honors
students). The course, overseen by Williams, complements
the existing curriculum at Terry, broadens the students’
perspective of potential careers to areas such as investment
banking and strategy consulting, grounds them in ethics and
gives them real-world knowledge and confidence to make
decisions.
“As we progress, we’re able to create a sustainable bridge
that connects Athens, Ga., to not just New York City, but
investment banking and strategy consulting,” Ostergard says.
When Patrick Dever (BBA ’10) receives a stack of 150
résumés applying for positions at Citi, the quality in terms of
high GPAs and relevant experience from UGA students stands
out, and not because it’s his alma mater.
“Almost universally, when I talk to people at Citi, people
say, ‘The Georgia kids come in, they interview better than
everybody else, they have better résumés than everybody else,
they know what to say.’”
—Lori Johnston is a writer living in Watkinsville.
Get more at honors.uga.edu
and terry.uga.edu.
Kevin Sun (center) speaks with Alex Edquist before the Corsair
Society meeting. Sun is a junior majoring in economics and
math, and Edquist is a junior majoring in economics.
ANDREW DAVIS TUCKER
DECEMBER 2014 • GEORGIA MAGAZINE
25