Chris Higgins

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I am working in the financial district of Boston as an Investment Associate at UBS Financial Services. I have my Series 7 and Series 63 Licenses, and I became a CFA charter holder in October of 2010 (the CFA program is a graduate level program for investment professionals). I am also a member of the CFA Institute and the Boston Security Analysts Society. Some of my job responsibilities include: putting together asset allocation models for existing clients; entering and executing both fixed income and equity trades; putting together marketing pieces to present to existing/prospective clients; tracking all of our equity and mutual fund holdings. My responsibilities continue to increase, which I like. I now join the senior person on our team on more meetings with our larger clients and will do solo meetings in the office if he is not around. I also write market commentary every month for some of our larger, institutional clients. I’m glad I have a liberal arts degree because that forced me to do a lot of writing and in addition to all those math proofs!

I would say taking challenging math courses (almost all of them are challenging) really develops one’s problem solving skills and one’s ability to analyze very complicated problems. Finance is a very complex field that requires exactly the type of analytical skills I developed at Saint Michael’s in the math department. Any job in finance requires excellent quantitative skills, which is exactly what the math professors gave to me. I would also add in that the degree in mathematics helped me immensely in studying for the CFA as statistics were a component of all three exams. Finance also uses the same Greek letters as math, like sigma, delta, gamma, etc. so I wasn’t confused by all the new jargon but was actually very comfortable with it.