--understand the health care industry.
Hi everyone.
My name is Siyu Bao.
You can call me Claire.
I'm a senior at Mount Holyoke College studying
psychology and statistics.
Today I would like to talk about my summer internship working
in a health care dedicated hedge fund in New York City.
So, first of all I will introduce the working
environment.
This is the building and this is our office.
And I'll start with what is a hedge fund?
So a hedge fund is in the opposite of sales side,
so it's a buy side.
It's generally a private investment fund
that only focuses on accredited investors.
So basically wealthy individuals.
And hedge funds generally have a lot of investment latitude.
That means we can invest in almost every field, lend,
real estate, equities, derivatives and all.
Compared to mutual funds, we have more freedom
and less regulatory limits.
And hedge funds use leverage to magnify financial returns.
So, we are actually risk seekers.
We don't avoid risk like mutual funds.
And that's the general difference with sell side.
And health care, from my perspective
working in a hedge fund, is that annually have a long term
growth plan, especially when, right
now, a lot of new technology is advancing
and it really drives the development of the health care
industry.
There's a huge market space.
The United States every year spends 17% of GDP
in health care, so there are numerous investment
opportunities, especially during the whole process of health
care delivery process.
We can take an example of a heart disease patient
He will generally first go to a primary care physician
to figure out what's his problem,
and then he will need to go to the hospital
to take further assessments.
So in this whole process, you will
need a lot of facilities, and also drugs, and also
all kinds of technologies that [INAUDIBLE] him.
So there's a lot of investment opportunities
during the process.
So the place I worked was OrbiMed advisors.
It consisted of three general sectors.
The first one is public equity, the second one
is private equity.
We have investments in the whole three regions in the world,
and royalty opportunities.
It's basically maintaining a long term connection
with our customers.
So my responsibilities consisted of the four sectors.
The first one is equity research.
So I was working two senior analysts
and studying the other companies they were covering.
Every day, I would work with them
to look into Wall Street projections
of these companies's growth.
There's a lot of specialist calls and a lot of meetings.
And also, I would look into clinical trials.
Because, generally speaking, in the health care industry
there's a lot of regulatory limits in the products
and technologies we're working on.
There's a high possibility that it's not
going to be passed by the USDA, so there's huge risk
and we need to be careful about that.
And the second part was modeling.
There is a lot of DCF modeling and a lot of projections,
and I was working on a company that went public
during my internship, and we went to the road show
and we met with the CEO.
It was fancy, but I didn't say a single word.
But it was good to take a look at it.
I've also had ongoing projects.
We were working with the operation team
on treating cost model, and there's
a lot of high level knowledge that I have never heard of,
but I learned on the spot and also learned
from the people I was working with.
So that has been a really rewarding experience.
I have also had tons of challenges
during my internship.
The first one is I am a psychology major.
I have never worked in finance before.
So how did I manage that?
Before the internship, I learned a lot by myself.
I studied the Vault guide.
That's my recommendations for anyone
else who is not a finance major but wants
to go into that field.
I also learned accounting by myself.
That has been really useful not only for the interviews,
but also on the job, like when we're looking to the companies,
I know where to go, I know where to focus,
and where to look for flaws in the financial statements.
And also general technical questions
and when you are working, feel free to ask people
as many questions as you have, because they are really
willing to help.
And it was also a very male dominated environment,
which was a little bit challenging
for me at the very beginning.
There was about 50 people in the company, but only five of them
are female.
And that was really intimidating to me,
because I was coming from Mount Holyoke,
and I was stressed at the very beginning,
but actually it's still--
males and females are not different in any way
in the workplace, because they support
you the same way, both emotionally and in the work.
And also, I'm not a native speaker,
and I was kind of nervous that I would not
fit into the environment, but I would
like to tell everyone who's going to the workplace here
that if the company is willing to hire you,
that means that you will fit in that place
and you will do well.
OK, and what I've learned from this experience
was that my attention to detail was promoted really high,
because there's a lot of rules and things
to look at in daily work, and I have
to be really careful about it.
It not only shows your professionality,
but also shows your ability to complete your work.
And the second one was financial literacy.
I learned so much, and right now I
can say that I'm not so different than people
who graduated from a business school.
And also how to--
I also gained a financial mindset,
like how to put my money in the most efficient way, personally.
I also learned about communication skills, which
has been really useful not only in the workplace,
but also coming back to Mount Holyoke.
It was a very intensive learning experience.
Now I understand my ability of learning new stuff,
and I really want to look into opportunities
like this in the future.
Because learning five minutes every day is really not much,
but if it accumulates, it's going to be a lot
and you're going to be benefiting
from it your whole life.
I would like to thank to thank OrbiMed advisors, who hired me,
And the CEO, Stan Isaly, I worked with him.
He didn't like me at all at the very beginning, [INAUDIBLE]
but as we progressed, he kind of saw the value in me,
and he has been like a grandfather to me
at the very end.
And my role models, Scott Stevens and my senior analyst
Jung Ryu, and my supervisor, Cason Kim.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]