Victoria Xiong

I've been in finance for about 5 years, and if you include accounting, about 7 years total. I'm currently employed at Morgan Stanley, and before that I was at Ross Capital Partners. I do pretty similar jobs in both firms - equity research and investment banking. The main difference is that Ross Capital Partners was tech-focused, while Morgan Stanley offers a broader sector coverage. When I started as a junior, I was doing modeling work, outreach to companies, getting to know the industry, and doing channel chats with supply chain manufacturers back in China. At that point, the main challenge was really diving into the finance industry and trying to understand what I actually needed to do at the job to perform. Building your network within the industry is something very important that you really need to work hard on. At Morgan Stanley, since it's a larger platform, you're dealing with more people within the department. We do collaborative work across different teams, so managing teamwork and handling large projects while collaborating with many people is one of the key challenges. Looking ahead in my career path, I'm thinking about doing a deep dive into a certain industry and gaining more visibility by building my own brand in front of other analysts within Wall Street. That's something I'm working on right now. I'm surrounded by great, hardworking people who are very knowledgeable about what they are doing, so it's definitely a very good environment to commit to.