Transform Your Skills and Achieve Your Goals Today

It all began in the early summer of 1977.

Fresh out of Temple University’s business school—well, almost—I initially landed a summer internship at The Irving Trust Company (located at the corners of Wall Street and Broadway), one of the most respected commercial banks on Wall Street. Irving wasn’t just a bank. It was a blue-blood institution, the kind of place where graduates from Harvard, Stanford, and NYU aimed to build careers in high finance. And here I was—a young man from Harlem and the Bronx, raised in the New York City public school system, stepping into a world where polished shoes, mahogany desks, and international money ruled the day.

The internship changed my life. They offered me a part-time position during the school year, which I gladly accepted. I worked Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in Manhattan—and then commuted to Philadelphia on Tuesdays and Thursdays to finish my degree at Temple. It wasn’t easy. Amtrak got most of my paycheck, but I saw it as an investment in something far more valuable—experience and a future.

At Irving Trust, I started in the Corporate Financial Counseling Department, where I worked on some pretty big stuff for a young guy: analyzing S&P debt-rated companies, researching floating-rate notes, and even diving deep into the Glass-Steagall Act, the law that once separated banks, insurance firms, and investment houses. (Ironically, that law would be repealed decades later, just before the 2008 financial crisis.)

After that, I moved into the International Credit Center, and that’s when my world truly opened up. I reviewed financial statements from companies in Europe, Australasia, South America, and the Middle East. I didn’t just study numbers—I began to understand how different parts of the world did business. Cultures, currencies, risk—each region had a story to tell.

My world truly opened up. I was exposed to the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Institutional Investor Magazine. Seeing millions of dollars flow through the SWIFT money transfer system provided a glimpse into the global economy. Life is much bigger than what was reported in the N.Y. Daily News. 

After two years with the bank, I knew then what I wanted: To be an international Investment banker and not an accountant. And not just someone who knew finance too, but someone who understood how money moved around the world.

Looking back, that summer job was more than a paycheck or a resume builder. It was the beginning of a journey—from the streets of Harlem and the Bronx to the global stage of high finance.