First Thoughts
Hi everyone, welcome to our blog! As our name suggests, we hope to use this medium as a space for genuine conversations and are beyond excited to become part of an ever-changing Wall Street. Over the next few weeks, we will be sharing conversations we had with our early talent - successful wall street recruits - and the years of development, struggle, and resilience they all faced to get to where they are today. By all means, do subscribe to and interact with our blog to give feedback on what you would like us to write about! We aim to serve our community first and foremost.
Today, I want to share the journey of how GenUnion came to be.
Jonathan Slavin is not only a veteran of Wall Street, having spent decades between UBS, Morgan Stanley, PIMCO, and George Weiss Associates, but also a veteran of the military. Yet, his service continues as a faithful alumnus of Franklin Pierce University and as a mentor helping countless students break into Wall Street. Among one of his most determined and resilient mentees was Adam Huang, whose initial misstep into engineering culminated into a career within Barclays' Sales and Trading division. Adam, who was deeply touched by the help he had gotten from many in the industry, conversed with Jon about creating a career mentorship program that had a personal touch and revolved around relationship building. I, at the time, was conducting research on the Future of Work for my university for which Adam promptly introduced me to Jon to speak about the formation of GenUnion.
From the formation of GenUnion in January 2021 till the end of spring, we beta tested a mentorship program which resulted in a ~98% percent success rate of landing students into Front Office Internships. We now had a proof of concept to share with our network, and we were able to hold extremely rewarding conversations with individuals across the industry. Among one of these individuals was Ariel Purnsrian, who pushed us to better our proof of concept. With her passion for mentorship and her background in Investment Banking and Venture Capital, she joined us as our fourth partner as we continued to test our program. After three successful seasons of recruiting, we are ready to present ourselves to the public.
We all came in with shared motivations for creating and contributing to GenUnion: from touching as many lives as possible, to making the recruiting process more inclusive, to offering a free mentorship program for a more equitable Wall Street, to ensuring that students were prepared to face the industry. At the end of the day however, what matters most to us are outcomes and we integrated these visions to create a truly unique experience for students. We can't wait for you to become a part of it.
Thank you,
Partner, GenUnion