Walk me through your resume.

I'll keep this to about 90 seconds and hit the through-line first: I'm a junior at [school] studying finance, and every step I've taken has been about getting closer to the question of how capital decisions actually shape companies.

The origin point was high school — my grandfather ran a small distribution business and let me sit in on a refi conversation with his banker. I didn't follow most of it, but the framing stuck with me: someone outside the company was helping him decide what the business was worth and how to fund the next stage. I wanted to be on that side of the table.

Freshman year I joined the student investment fund and pitched a long thesis on a mid-cap industrial. The pitch lost the vote, but the senior who ran research pulled me aside afterward, and that conversation got me my sophomore-summer role at a regional middle-market boutique. There I worked on a $180M industrials sale-side process — I built the operating model, ran the data room, and sat in on every management meeting. That's when banking shifted from "interesting" to "this is the apprenticeship I want."

Last summer I was at [PE / corp dev / equity research] firm, where I saw how investors evaluate the work bankers produce. That perspective is the reason I'm here today. I want a top-tier analyst seat where I can build the foundational reps in modeling and process management, and your group is at the top of my list because of [specific reason — group head, recent deal, cultural read].