Her Story
About Liv
I'm an Account Executive with Prosek Partners Special Situations Team in New York City, where I've been for about a year and 3 months. In my role, I do special situations communications, which means I work closely with legal counsel and bankers on complex, fast-moving situations. This could be anything from litigation engagements, fast-moving mergers and acquisitions, CEO or executive management changes, shareholder activism situations, or proxy advisory work. We develop communications rollouts for companies and help them work through these situations from a communications standpoint. I graduated from Colgate University, a small liberal arts school in upstate New York, with a degree in political science. The cornerstone of my liberal arts education was reading, writing, and researching, and those skills really lent themselves well to a role in communications. I've always been interested in economics, the financial markets, and political science and politics as well. Between my interest in the markets and the financial aspect of business, as well as the education I got at Colgate, all of those things just kind of yielded a role in special situations communications, where I get to exercise those skills every day. I'm really grateful to be at this firm, which is really a top-tier firm, and I'm thankful for the people I work with who have been incredibly influential and helpful in my career development.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Liv
01What do you attribute your success to?
I think just the people that came before me, and that includes people who came before me in my life, such as my family, my teachers, my professors, and my friends as well, who've been incredibly supportive. But I also think the people who came before me in my job, and the people who are there now as well, who are teaching me all the good things and teaching me the things that I need to do and need to know to be successful.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I've ever received is staying calm, cool, and collected when things are moving fast. You know, clients might not be as sorted as they should be or can be. Because if you can kind of be that calm throughout the storm, then people are going to look to you at all moments.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say staying calm, cool, and collected when things are moving fast. You know, clients might not be as sorted as they should be or can be. Because if you can kind of be that calm throughout the storm, then people are going to look to you at all moments.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think from a communications perspective, communications are happening all the time, everywhere. They happen in person, they happen online, they happen in formal spaces like in the news, but also in informal spaces, like different corners of the web, or people are videoing each other and things like that. So I think from a communications perspective, that kind of poses a challenge, because it's hard to control the narrative when it's in so many different places, and it's spreading so quickly.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I think putting the people you work with, putting people you interact with daily, first. Work is important, but at the end of the day, what you have is the people around you, and building connections with others and looking at the relationships with them far beyond it on a transactional basis is really important. Because when the workday's done, that's who you have, that's what you have, and then when you go home to your family or whoever you live with, that's who you have as well, so forming good relationships is important because those will last your lifetime.
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