2020 Graduate Joins Blackstone as Private Equity Associate

When Jamie Rosiello ’20 was heading into the private equity industry’s on-cycle recruiting process in September of 2021, his firm of choice was Blackstone, which his Isenberg mentor—Finance Department Chair Nikunj Kapadia—calls “the most prestigious private equity firm in the world.”

Rosiello says he was fortunate, because the recruiting delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic had allowed him to gain extra experience before entering the fray among the “best of the best across Wall Street.” During on-cycle recruiting, all major private equity firms rush to secure talent for their future associate classes, scheduling interviews around the clock over a single week and making job offers with short turnaround times.

“I always knew that if I could get in the door for an interview, I was confident I could compete with anyone for a position,” Rosiello says. “But on-cycle recruiting has such a large talent pool for so few positions, in order to even get past the resume phase is extremely difficult.”

But Rosiello had been busy since his spring 2020 graduation, joining RBC Capital Markets as an investment banking analyst within the firm’s Mergers & Acquisitions group, where he was the sole analyst working on the merger of Discovery and WarnerMedia on behalf of Advance Newhouse, Discovery’s largest shareholder.

“That was the first deal where I was given a very large amount of responsibility—as well as workload—and I was able to perform over a three-month timespan,” Rosiello says of the experience. “This deal served as a valuable learning experience as well as the catalyst for securing a job at Goldman Sachs’s Technology, Media, and Telecom group a few months later.”

His experiences at Goldman and RBC opened up the door to get him into the first round of interviews at Blackstone. “And with my foot in the door,” he says, “I was able to deliver throughout the entire process and secure an offer.”

The Path to Finance Success

Rosiello’s career plans entering college involved dedication and skill in a different field: “My dream in life for as long as I could remember was to be a professional soccer player,” he says. After high school, he secured a partial scholarship to Boston University to play on the team there. During his freshman year at BU, however, due to strong competition among his teammates and injury, he wasn’t able to negotiate for more financial aid.

“So then I started having difficult conversations with friends, family and myself about my future,” he says. He was paying for school himself, and even with his soccer scholarship, he knew that continuing at BU would result in very large amounts of student debt. “I decided to transfer to UMass, where I would pay in-state tuition, my financial aid package was much better, and I could also continue to play soccer.”

This transition, however, compelled Rosiello to start focusing more on academia. He leaned into learning about finance at Isenberg, where he particularly enjoyed classes with Professor Kapadia.

“He was the professor I became the closest with during my time at Isenberg, and still to this day,” Rosiello says. “Nikunj’s international finance and financial engineering courses were by far the two most rigorous and interesting classes I took at Isenberg. I could tell right from the start that Nikunj had such a strong grasp of the subject matter, paired with an incredible intellect.”

Kapadia appreciated his student’s drive and curiosity, and has been supporting Rosiello’s career moves since graduation, emphasizing that his new role at Blackstone is the product of extremely hard work and dedication. “Basically, it is a very prestigious placement for a UMass Finance student a couple of years out of school,” Kapadia says.

Rosiello continues to make the most of every step in his career. “Blackstone has been an incredible experience so far,” he says. “There are so many brilliant people around that I am constantly learning from. The job is intellectually stimulating and continuously teaches me how to think like a private equity investor.”