Rishi Bahl '14

Name: Rishi Bahl

Rishi Bahl ’14, a corporate finance major, got his job with GE Capital through what he calls a “networking dream story.”

While attending an Isenberg-affiliated Net Impact talk, Rishi met a panelist from GE Power & Water. Rishi expressed his interest in the company, and the panelist put him in touch with a colleague at GE’s Financial Management Program (FMP). The rest is history.

“I took the job right away because I knew it was my best opportunity,” Rishi says.

Rishi is now in the thick of a two-year rotational program, which allows him to work in four different assignments. GE’s FMP program attracts many of the brightest minds coming out of business school.

“I’m meeting people from all over the country,” he says. “I wouldn’t have had this opportunity to meet so many people.”

Working in a team setting has given him a new appreciation for his courses at Isenberg.

“Everything I’ve learned at Isenberg is coming up,” he says. “You just get more comfortable understanding where people with different viewpoints are coming from when you do a lot of group projects.”

Besides his savvy networking skills, what else impressed GE about Rishi? His resume. With the help of the UMass and Isenberg career centers, Rishi had been procuring valuable work experience and internships since he arrived on campus.  

During his junior and senior years, Rishi worked for State Street Corporation, which had recently opened an office in Hadley—a town over from Amherst. State Street is one of the world’s leading financial service providers, and the job gave Rishi access to real-world work experience.

“It was a huge deal for me,” Rishi says. “It’s not just another dining commons job. To get actual experience processing multi-million trades with a huge investment management firm was crazy.”

This experience added to his resume made him attractive to JPMorgan Chase. Over the summer of his junior year, Rishi interned with the company’s Corporate Analyst Development Program (CADP).

And this internship, in turn, made Rishi ever the more confident when it came time to pursuing GE Capital.

“If you’re driven and you want something, you can get it at Isenberg,” he says.

While he’s going for what he wants, Rishi is thankful he’s not saddled with a lot of debt.

“I went to Isenberg because it was a good balance of a good school with a small program,” he says. “Cost was a huge factor.”