Tech-Focused Courses and Internship Are Keys to Launching Career

High-quality faculty, a tech-savvy curriculum, and the downtown Chicago location drew Rucha Dhopeshwar to Stuart School of Business for the Master of Science in Finance program.

“The fact that a lot of technology and programming is used in the courses really impressed me,” she says. To complement the curriculum, she tapped into a variety of hands-on experiences to apply what she was learning.

As a teaching assistant for three courses at Stuart—Financial Modeling, Economics of Capital Investments, and Financial Accounting—Dhopeshwar took on the role of supporting and guiding other students. “I think being a TA helped me learn even more, digging deep into the subjects,” she says. “Every question from a student was a new learning opportunity for me.”

Through Illinois Tech’s Elevate program, she landed an internship as a regulatory reporting analyst at Societe Generale, a leading financial services company, where she put her newly-learned skills in financial modeling, market risk management, and Python programming to the test. Dhopeshwar’s tasks and responsibilities were in large trader adjustments, reports to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and CME exchanges, as well as helping in other projects to reconcile multiple files using SQL statements.

“The programming skills that I learned in my finance courses were very much appreciated at my workplace,” she says. “Along with my regular responsibilities, I was given a chance to work with other teams to automate some things and for reconciliation of files.”

Dhopeshwar also participated as a member of the Illinois Tech team in the CFA Institute Research Challenge, a global student equity research contest. As a member of the competition team, every day brought a new challenge. “I learned so much during that period, from report writing to PowerPoint presentations to presenting,” she says. “I never imagined I would give a presentation in front of hundreds of people and students from many different schools, as I did in the CFA Challenge. I think that was a turning point in my life, which made me more confident than ever before.”

After her yearlong internship, Societe Generale offered Dhopeshwar a full-time job as a listed derivatives delivery analyst, where she’s been working since completing her master’s. “Now I plan to use all the knowledge gained during the degree and put it into making work more efficient and giving more new ideas to my work colleagues,” she says.

• Learn more about the M.S. in Finance program.