Oct 26, 2026 · 39 min · 11 segments
Her college career office was supposed to forward her resume to a foundation. Instead, Ariel Investments kept it, and she ended up working next to the founder. Liz sits down with Lena Diasti, Chief…
Liz XuHost
So jumping into kind of the career meet section of the interview, I'd love to hear what drew you in the beginning to finance and investing.
I didn't grow up around families who talked about the stock market or spoke about finance or were in investment banking.
Like those terms I didn't know until I got to college and everyone was kind of fighting for these jobs and they told me this was a thing to do.
And so I figured let's use second year of college to just figure out things that I don't know.
And so I decided to do all of these kind of intro entry programs that you're probably familiar with, like with all these banks, did it with hedge funds.
and all the different kind of elements and sides you could be on, whether it be like diligence side or if you're in sales and trading or hedge fund, which was interesting, but I realized maybe not my personality.
But I got lucky where I kind of got into a few of these early insight programs or saw your sophomore going to junior year programs.
And so you're like first summer back with people and they let us come to New York and we stayed in their housing and we just kind of got this really immersive experience to learn what finance was.
We did some work, they did some trainings with us, But I think that that was like scratching this itch for me of figuring out something I didn't know.
So jumping into kind of the career meet section of the interview, I'd love to hear what drew you in the beginning to finance and investing.
I didn't grow up around families who talked about the stock market or spoke about finance or were in investment banking.
Like those terms I didn't know until I got to college and everyone was kind of fighting for these jobs and they told me this was a thing to do.
And so I figured let's use second year of college to just figure out things that I don't know.
And so I decided to do all of these kind of intro entry programs that you're probably familiar with, like with all these banks, did it with hedge funds.
and all the different kind of elements and sides you could be on, whether it be like diligence side or if you're in sales and trading or hedge fund, which was interesting, but I realized maybe not my personality.
But I got lucky where I kind of got into a few of these early insight programs or saw your sophomore going to junior year programs.
And so you're like first summer back with people and they let us come to New York and we stayed in their housing and we just kind of got this really immersive experience to learn what finance was.
We did some work, they did some trainings with us, But I think that that was like scratching this itch for me of figuring out something I didn't know.
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