Personalized support encourages women to study finance

Studying economics was never a childhood dream for Anna Gamberoni, but the subject instinctively came to her when she decided to complete her Bachelor's degree at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. Originally from northern Italy, the 26-year-old, the eldest of three siblings, is the first in her family to follow the academic path. From the very beginning, she has been an unfailingly diligent student, which has led her to the EPFL. In 2021, she wishes to continue her studies and chooses the Master in Financial Engineering. "I chose the Lausanne campus because it was at the top of the list of the best schools in the field," she explains.

With her Bachelor's degree in hand, the young woman first entered the world of work with a first position in an online bank with offices in Krakow, Poland. She was hired as a compliance analyst, more specifically in the field of money laundering. She followed this up with a second experience at another financial institution in the area. But the field of finance is so vast that she wishes to broaden her knowledge by adding a more technical approach, as taught at the College of Management and Technology of the EPFL.

Best application file

When she arrived in Lausanne, Anna Gamberoni started looking for financial support since her savings were not enough to cover her entire education. Her efforts were laborious until the unexpected and welcome announcement of the "Women in Finance" scholarship. This partnership between Unigestion, a company specializing in asset management for investors from around the world, and the EPFL offers to support a student enrolled in the Master of Financial Engineering program. With the aim of promoting the training of women in a still largely male-dominated field, this 10,000 franc scholarship is accompanied by mentoring. It is awarded to the best application of the year, evaluated by a committee composed of the faculty and the director of the Master's section. An expert from Unigestion is committed to accompanying the student according to her needs throughout the program and a place in the company for the end-of-study internship is also offered. Anna Gamberoni was the first to benefit from this.

After three weeks of intensive French classes to get by in her new adopted city, she started her Master's degree with some apprehension. "I thought I was missing a more technical background and I quickly realized that I would have to work twice as hard to get up to speed," she says. While the view of the mountains from her dorm room motivates her, she has little time to admire it, as her studies take up all her energy. Concentrating on revising and preparing group work with her classmates, she quickly takes pleasure in approaching finance with new tools, between mathematics, statistical calculations or machine learning.

If I have one piece of advice for aspiring fellows, it's to take advantage of your mentor as much as possible and ask her any questions you may have even if you don't yet know what field you'll be working in later.

Her mentor introduced her to a specialization she hadn't yet discovered: private equity. "It was totally new to me and I found it very interesting to immerse myself in it through the experience of an expert in the field." So it was only natural that Anna Gamberoni decided to do her graduate internship at Unigestion, working on a project that combined private equity and machine learning.

"If I have one piece of advice for future fellows, it's to take advantage of your mentor as much as possible and ask any questions you may have even if you don't yet know what field you'll be working in later. Personally, exchanging with finance professionals with different profiles has helped me a lot to advance and refine my choices."