Equities Analyst
Morningstar, Inc., Downtown Chicago
Jaime also holds an MBA from the University of Chicago (2005). At ISU she double-majored in Finance and Accounting, and was a Presidential Scholar.
She is pictured at the Morningstar headquarters in Chicago.
Area of Finance specialization: Investments and Portfolio Management
Hometown: Sterling, Illinois
FIL 381 CFA ® Level I Review. That class tied together everything I had studied in my accounting, economics, and finance courses. It prepared me to pass the Level I exam comfortably, and gave me a lot of confidence going into Level II. I felt more confident in taking that difficult exam than my colleagues who took Level I review courses at other, better known universities. Having that course was a huge benefit.
Trips to Chicago through Financial Management Association. I was actively involved for four years, and was president my senior year, so I got to see and do a lot. A group of the officers went to FMA's student leadership conference, and they took us to the Mercantile Exchange, where I understood what was going on, including the hand signals, because we had talked about it in my derivatives class. But the big trip was to Wrigley Field, where the controller spoke to us out in the grandstand seats, and they took us to the press box and the Cubs' dugout – places other Cub fans only dream about being.
Since graduating I've worked as an equities analyst, first at State Farm and now at Morningstar. My job is to analyze companies to determine whether their stocks are good investments. The Educational Investment Fund was an excellent trial run for what I do every day. My advanced financial accounting course was also extremely useful; it taught me how to look beneath the surface and tell when a firm is manipulating its numbers to make its financial picture seem rosier than it really is. I felt well prepared for the finance courses I took as an MBA student in a very competitive program.
The best feature is the access you have to professors. You can get to know them and ask questions about their experiences, and learn more about how the classroom theory is applied in the real world. The upper level classes are usually fairly small, and so are honors program sections of freshman and sophomore courses.
