Interviewer: Okay, very nice! All right, so today we have Catie Duggan joining from Middlebury College and Middlebury is just a place I’m really familiar with having grown up in Vermont and you and I got connected through my job at Tuck and you’ve been an amazingly supportive student through staying in touch and being an alum of our programs and so I had to reach out – your personality, your experiences are all amazing, so we want to dive into all those things today. But quick background: So I mentioned Middlebury College; you have a focus in econ and finance; you’re on the lacrosse team, so you’re currently in season and there are all kinds of things to unpack. So a huge thank you for joining; I appreciate you making time. 

And, first question, I always start with: We’d love to know how you ended up at Middlebury College.

Catie: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks for having me. I mean my path to joining Middlebury College was a little bit different from most people’s. I was a recruited athlete, so I found out that I would be coming to Middlebury in the summer after my junior year of high school. I was actually originally committed to play Division I lacrosse at Harvard, so that was where I committed to play lacrosse when I was a freshman in high school, and then during my junior year of high school, there was a coaching change at Harvard and they decided not to keep me on as a recruit, so it turned into kind of a scramble of athletic recruiting, talking to all the D3 coaches I could talk to, because the D1 recruiting was kind of over at that point, and you know everyone says everything happens for a reason. I truly do believe that because I don’t think there was going to be anywhere that I’d be happier at school than at Middlebury. So I ended up talking with the coaches, KP who is the current head coach and Katie Ritter was the assistant coach at the time who was running recruiting, I talked had many conversations with them. Ultimately, you know they were my very top choice on July 1st when athletic pre-reads came out and I was lucky enough to get an offer from them, so that’s where I ended up. And that’s kind of what brought me to Middlebury College. I was a student at Middlebury; it was more I say it’s you know not like the normal path because it didn’t really have a lot to do with what majors Middlebury offered, yet you know the academic prestige of it. I knew that I wanted to go to a school that had a lot of academic prestige. I knew that I wanted to go to a school that offered a multitude of majors and a ton of different opportunities because I didn’t know what I would want to be studying, but it did at the time matter to me that it was a good place to play lacrosse for four years, and it has been so, that’s that.

Interviewer: That is a wild recruiting story, I didn’t know that, talk about adversity, that is a crazy story, especially to open with, just like having to adapt and shift in high school and you kind of have your mind set on one place, and Harvard of all places. People are going to get tired of hearing me say this but coming from my D3 background talking about the similarities of the process. And the level of competition at a really strong D3, you can be very similar to a D2 or a D1, especially when you’re considering academics, all the things you just talked about so Harvard missed out for sure. We’ll start with that. The coaching changes and team structure and just how that process works it can be absolute chaos and I know my brother started out at Iona playing D1 baseball and the coaching had turnover more than once so he changed things up and went to play D2 in California and his D2 team ended up being much better. It happens all the time and you commit to a support system and it changes so that’s a really big deal, 

…so I guess my question coming out of that in that shift you just talked about, you wanted to prioritize academics, but were you were looking at a lot of different schools through that process or was it really focused on a good fit, lacrosse-wise and school-wise?

Catie: I actually really focused kind of on the NESCAC schools when I was looking to play Division III lacrosse. I focused really on Ivy League schools for D1, and so when the D1 window passed, and I knew I was going to play D3 lacrosse because in my mind, not playing lacrosse in college just wasn’t an option. I knew I wanted to play four more years; I knew my career wasn’t done, and so you know the next wave of programs to look at was D3, and that was for me after you know academically, the top tier D3 lacrosse programs academically are the NESCAC. So it kind of became, you know I was looking at Ivy League schools and then was only looking at NESCAC and there was a camp that I went to my junior fall that was actually run by one of our assistant coaches here at Middlebury now and all the NESCAC coaches were there and so that helped me start every single one of my conversations with the NESCAC coaches and you know went on from there. 

Interviewer: And especially knowing how good you are it probably took one camp and they’re like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna take you,” so that’s good, it sounds like that was a faster process and you got to meet the coaches through that which is great, okay, so we landed on Middlebury, and I’d say Middlebury is definitely the highest academically ranked school in Vermont, tucked in a very beautiful part of the state. So just to give you another framework, so all those questions I sent, we’re going to touch on the community so what it’s like to live in that area, curriculum, and then like we’ll talk about professional stuff later but, so 

…remind me where you’re from again or the audience.

Catie: Yep, I’m originally from Connecticut, Darien. Connecticut, so the Fairfield County area.

Interviewer: So another great part of New England, what was that transition like to Middlebury, was it familiar culturally? Did it feel really strange and different? 

Catie: It definitely felt different. I don’t think I would say that it was familiar in the sense of I mean I don’t think it was any different from anyone else going from you know high school to college. I have siblings who went to boarding school so I think that their transition maybe was different than mine in the sense that they had already been living away from home but I had never been living away from home so for me transitioning from high school to college was probably the biggest leap was just being so far from home and suddenly having you know my parents weren’t around to guide me or tell me you know what time I need to be home or help me out with my school and lacrosse commitments so it was definitely like a very quick learning experience of like how do I put all this responsibility all on my own how do I keep myself organized which I think you know I did a pretty good job of that in high school so it was a pretty easy transition to college, but I will say that, it was a little bit weird because I did come to college in the fall of 2020 and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna go to college in the fall of 2020’ so it was in the middle of COVID. But similar to my high school experience, Middlebury is such a small school and I know most people here. I knew everyone at my high school, you know, I wouldn’t say that I know everyone at Middlebury, but I know probably you know 75 of the campus, enough to you know say hello to most people, at least many of those in my grade and of the people who are you know similar ages to mine or those who are other athletes, that’s another thing. We have a small school and a lot of teams so just naturally there’s a large proportion of athletes on the campus, which is you know also very similar to my high school experience and growing up is just kind of surrounding myself with athletes.

Interviewer: Yeah, for sure and when I started working at Dartmouth, it blew my mind too with the stat I think it’s over 32 percent of all students are you on a varsity athletic team, so even more are involved with club sports too.

Catie: Yeah, that makes sense.

Interviewer: It’s probably similar to Middlebury and so you have enough students where you can branch out. I keep trying to interview people with all kinds of different experiences but I keep landing on these like awesome student-athletes and it just, I don’t know if they just like gravitate toward me because that was my experience, but I just think it’s interesting because you have that connection and family immediately with your team, your roommates, that kind of thing. I swear I reach out to all kinds of students. Like hundreds online. But another testament to networking and students I have met or have things in common with, they tend to say yes to interviews for Campus Overload. 

But back to you, was it easy to meet admins and kind of other staff on campus even through the COVID period?

Catie: Honestly, I feel like yes it was, I mean yes, that fall was pretty difficult in terms of doing too much, especially Middlebury was very shut down, I think even compared to a lot of other different schools. So it was it was definitely a little bit difficult, but at the same time every single class that I was in and every program that I was in was very shut down, you know. Extracurricular event that I was a part of, I definitely got to know every faculty member who was involved in whatever way that was so I wouldn’t say that it was difficult at all. I do think that what I’ve found with the people who are running Middlebury is, that they, they really do love their interaction with the students and so I think that there’s like a very conscious effort to interact with students on a daily basis, whether that be you know just natural coming to the sidelines of practice or whether it’s asking that everyone comes to office hours regardless of whether they have questions or not and scheduling outside time for that kind of thing so I would say that it was pretty easy.

Interviewer: One of the first college football games I went to was Middlebury because UVM only has club now, it’s like a long time ago that they got rid of that and some family friend of mine knew an assistant coach or some faculty member and so like that small town feel where the game ends you can go run around the field and all the kids are playing and I think it just creates that feel of community so on that theme, 

… last question because it’s a small town and small campus and everybody kind of knows each other are there areas that are like most popular to hang out on campus or in town? 

Catie: Yeah I mean like you said it is such a small town so I would say that during the school year i think that everything in town is definitely nice as you walk into any coffee shop any grocery store any you know breakfast spot lunch spot and there are students in there and there are also local Middlebury people who live here year round but there are definitely students everywhere I’d say which I think is pretty fun on campus. I think that there’s a lot of congregation in the dining halls and that’s where a lot of people find their groups for social time during the day and especially in the winter and we’re not spending any time outside. We’ve got three dining halls and so they’re all pretty much there’s always people in there having meals and whatnot but there are people in there just hanging out there are people in there on their computers doing work so it’s pretty it’s pretty wherever you go in on campus there will be clutches of people socializing and gathering. 

Interviewer: Yeah and downtown is so small like in a really quaint pretty way. I’ve been on campus a few times a year for work and to hang out with friends and I always forget where downtown starts and ends in relation to campus. It’s convenient there’s stuff everywhere to access which I think is important and yeah, you’re just going to run into faculty and students everywhere just like you said which is cool, so shifting to school curriculum kind of the things I’ve learned about you, but I just want to share that side of your story.

Can we hear about how you landed on econ and some of the opportunities you pursued? 

Catie: Definitely. Yes, so I took my freshman year, I think.

we were, you know, registration was kind of a hectic situation at Middlebury just because there are so many students registering for all these classes all at once, so it’s kind of your freshman year, your first semester or two, it’s kind of just the luck of the draw of what classes you do get put into and so I ended up taking I think my freshman year seminar which was like a public speaking class and then as well as an intro to macroeconomics class and a history class and an acting class. So of those, I felt like it was a very well-rounded semester in terms of what I was taking subject wise and I just I really liked my macroeconomics class. I remember my professor describing it on the first day of economics being you know not exactly you know not necessarily about money about numbers but more about the study of human behavior and why people make decisions and usually in our case in the way that we apply it is in terms of money in terms of are you trading off leisure time for extra hours of work or are you trading off you know x amount of dollars for x amount of happiness that you get from consuming a good or something so I just really enjoyed econ and I really loved my professor. He’s also my advisor, so that was my first econ class and I didn’t declare a major for, I think, not for two and a half more semesters after that, so but, I, went back to my first econ professor because he was just very hopeful, super down to earth, and that was the way I felt, feel a lot about all the econ professors that I had met after that class was they were all very young. They kind of felt like they could be you know one of your friend’s parents or they could be your friend who’s just like a couple years older than you, they’re all very down to earth, very relaxed, very nice, very chill people, which was a surprise for me. I feel like everyone kind of makes college professors seem like super rigid professionals and you know stuffy and you know coming to class in a suit or whatever. Not trying to generalize but hopefully you know what I mean. And that just hasn’t been my experience at Middlebury. It was way more relaxed; it’s more of a collaboration, I feel like, between the class and the professor, at a lot of times. It did also help that I was never on one track in high school. I was never you know like obsessed with science or obsessed with English or history in a way that I was like ‘Oh, I want to make a career out of these subjects.’ It was also I’ve also watched my dad and my brothers-they’re all in finance roles, and it what kind of felt like a pretty natural progression for me, watching these older people in my life be in this career, that has very obvious payoffs, and also maintains kind of a semblance of team sports a little bit. And you know I’ve also watched my dad and my brothers, it’s very competitive, there’s a lot of work that you’re putting in, you’re sometimes working against the clock, and it’s ultimately financially pretty rewarding, so I ended up going down, you know, the finance recruiting path, and I’m working in private equity when I graduate from Middlebury this spring so I’m pretty excited about that and it also is definitely helps that the major that I chose supports that in a way and I’m really excited about that. Middlebury’s very liberal arts so it’s not like I’m taking accounting or you know financial modeling 101 anything like that but it is very helpful to have these kind of high level sometimes lofty conversations about economic policy and how inflation affects this group of people and terror affecting this group of people and etc like I feel like it just gives me a very well-rounded view on the world. And this summer I was one of the only liberal arts kids in my intern class, and a lot of the other ones were you know business finance majors from schools that offer that kind of thing, and I was definitely catching up for a decent chunk of the summer in terms of Excel and modeling. In a way I did have a pretty good background of that because of my time at Tuck Bridge, and that helped me you know propel me on my career path as well, but those technical aspects of the job were not hard for me to catch up on and they weren’t hard for me to get up to speed very quickly, but there was this kind of more intangible quality of me being able to look at the economy in general and these you know potentially potential industries that our company maybe wanted to invest in as a private equity you know sponsor and that was a lot more helpful I think to me compared to my peers’ finance business backgrounds in the job just because like, yes, it did it take me a little bit longer to work on an Excel spreadsheet at the beginning of the summer, sure. But by the end of the summer, we were all doing all these technicals at the same pace and I had this additional ability to read papers and be able to communicate ideas at a more of a wide-reaching level that I feel like a lot of my the other interns weren’t quite able to do as well. 

Interviewer: Yeah, that’s really good insight and kind of just the whole picture of what you’re talking about, and in that process. And you mentioned the Bridge program and skill development and that was one thing I just wanted to highlight. I’m a few, more than a few years past where you are now; I just turned 30 but what I was going to say is every position I’ve seen or people I know that they go into a role nobody knows exactly how to do everything, so when you’re striving for those positions where you have to develop a lot of skill to perform well in them, you’re in the right place in my opinion at least so to hear what you’re saying, only a couple months not a super long learning curve I think it’s important to hear that, and companies are going to prioritize candidates who can adapt. They want their teams to tie in the skills that you bring to the table too and so again just circling back to everything: NESCACs and the student athlete skill set and all those things are really valuable on a resume and I think companies are paying attention to that. I know MBAs for their full-time programs they’re paying attention to that as well, they’re taking history majors and econ majors and all types of people from all these different places because they can train you and develop those skills and I think that’s great. think we’re probably going to hit time in a little bit so

I just wanted to ask one specific question, as private equity is such a big buzzword and popular industry. What was the interview process like for getting your job?

Catie: Yeah, the interview process is really important and I think it’s really important to have a lot of times, I think a little bit simple for me in terms of this company specifically just because it was after it was later than the you know investment banking process, sales and trading investment banking process. I was a little bit behind the ball on the investment banking process, I wasn’t sure if I was gonna be doing software engineering, or go down the hard finance route, I was kind of flirting with both of those ideas at the time, and ultimately picked software engineering. At first had a bad internship experience with that, and then pivoted pretty fully to investment banking and that recruiting process. And I had I had just missed the opportunity to do that, and I was kind of kind of the first round, like I went I tried to do it a little bit half effort in into it because I wasn’t really sure I was committing to it, and you know the investment banking all finance recruiting processes are pretty they’re a lot, you know, you have to study for these interviews and have all these flashcards and memorize you know these different financial models and that’s as a liberal arts student preparing for the interview so I was kind of preparing for those interviews is a full-time job so I just didn’t commit to that. Essentially, and so I missed that whole process, and then after the fact, I was scrambling a little bit to find a job. And I essentially, I applied to every single job that I could find that was financial online on LinkedIn on Handshake on the Tuck Bridge Alumni Career Center. Applied to everything, and this was the company that reached back out to me pretty quickly. I had I think I had three interviews with them, one of them was pretty behavioral, another was, and then the second two were a mixture of technical and behavioral, and they extended that offer to me after that. I do think that getting private equity internships during your junior summer are pretty rare, and also pretty rare to get for those internships to offer full-time positions after that. From what I’ve heard from people talking about it at my company, Access Holdings, they are finding that they’re enjoying recruiting these full-time undergraduate students, because I think that the old idea was that private equity firms just didn’t know how to train analysts the way that investment banking firms could, and so my company I guess has just decided that they can train us just as well, and they want to be able to train us from the very start in private equity ideas and private equity mindset and the private equity skill set. Did you apply to just like dozens and dozens of jobs? Is there like a number you have in mind how many? It was if I had to take a guess I applied to a hundred jobs, I’d say like I figured it was something like that. Yeah, I was applying not like it was non-stop just applying and it does you know it does.

Interviewer: One thing you touched on that stood out is the shift by Access Holdings. Sometimes these shifts by companies are impossible to figure out unless it happens kind of organically in some sense like you’re talking about, but there are certain companies that same thing as your coaching situation they have turnover leadership or the dynamic of their team. Shifts where they want to prioritize certain kinds of hires, and there is no real way to track it other than through networking and applying for a lot of roles. There’s no way to know which companies are doing that and they’ll just decide oh we need a lot more liberal arts students like in our comms department or marketing or even finance, but once they do that for like two or three years they might shift back. And it’s all just kind of trying to balance who’s coming into their company. So totally I think the major point that you’ve made is just put in the effort to reach out to all these places because eventually you’ll land that opportunity that matches, oh we want a student athlete type person from Middlebury with this background and that kind of thing, and yeah it’s just the competitiveness around getting an internship and getting a job offer as you just experienced is crazier than it’s ever been but the outcomes can be really good too. So last question we got what six and a half minutes, 

last question is just what’s your biggest tip or advice for making the most of undergrad.

Catie: I think that the biggest tip I would give to someone who is you know starting out school right now is to take as many classes as possible in different fields. I did a pretty good job of that in the beginning in my freshman year and now my senior year I feel like I’ve also taken a pretty good wide range of classes. What I regret in you know my sophomore junior years getting a little complacent and knowing what was familiar to me knowing what I might be able to get like you know a bit of an easier job in an easier workload in certain areas of my life and I think that’s a really good tip. I do regret not taking more creative out-of-the-box types of classes. I feel like Middlebury is an amazing school and I think that graduating with a Middlebury College diploma is enough for a lot of places, I could have sacrificed a few lower grades to take some incredible classes taught by the leading experts in their field. I’m currently digging this class called African Environmental Works, which is it’s like a class taught by this literary professor who was raised in Africa, and is you know sort of in the environmental department, sort of in the literature department, and it just kind of opens your eyes a little bit more and shows you how much there is out there, and so yeah I guess that that would be my biggest piece of advice would be to take as many of those classes as possible. 

Interviewer: Yeah that’s good advice I never figured out that balance. There were semesters where I was just drowning academically and then others where I did exceptionally well. Part of it’s just like you get to junior senior year and you can reflect and you kind of understand better. But it’s good to reflect on, it’s good you have time to enjoy kind of the last few classes that you have, and um, so just want to end with congratulations on the job that’s a huge relief, it’s exciting, and then just another huge thank you. I think this was an awesome conversation. 

Catie: Yeah, absolutely Will, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.