The Career Services staff in GSOM was honored to host Micheline Yacoub, partner at New York Life (NYL), on campus to meet with graduate students to take part in an informal and interactive session on the financial advising career.

Yacoub joined New York Life in April 2011 as a financial advisor, but rose quickly to their executive council within the first two years of her tenure. She shared this career path with students, focusing specifically on her time as a hard-working and accomplished financial advisor dealing with client financial security, retirement funding, business solutions and estate conservation.

Included in Yacoub’s talk was her take on various qualifications which she feels are essential to success in the financial industry.  To the students’ surprise, Yacoub noted that communication skills were more essential than financial skills at various points in one’s career.

“As a financial adviser, the key to success is to make people trust you,” she stated. “How can you expect people to count on you to manage their money if you can’t earn their trust?”

Yacoub continued, “To be trustworthy, you need to be able to pay attention to details, understand complexity, and most important, make complicated financial terms easily understood by clients”

Afterward, Yacoub answered questions from the audience and met with students individually. They appreciated the excellent first-hand knowledge she shared.

“This presentation provide me great insight into the financial service industry,” said Zhengru Hong, a first-year masters in finance student. “Yacoub really helped me gain a better understanding of the day-to-day realities of a financial adviser, which I’m looking into for my career. I feel more confident in directing my career path, too.”

[Tianan Gao, MSF ’16, contributed to this article.]