Back row, L to R: Vivian Ji, Richard Lee, Claire Blazewicz, Michael Carter, Joseph Kang, Brian Oh, Adam Ferguson. Photo: Brandon Sanchez
- 13 MBA students, most headed for investment banking, were named this year’s Finance Fellows.
- All students receive scholarships and alumni mentors.
- Fellows are chosen based on their preparedness and promise in achieving their career goals in finance.
Adam Ferguson, MBA 28, built a career at biotech startups, programming and engineering laboratory robots to take over work scientists once did by hand. Most recently, he led an automation team at a company developing protein-sequencing technology.
But as a technical employee with a bioengineering degree, Ferguson often felt removed from the strategic and financial decisions shaping the companies for which he worked. “We’d usually hear about a big deal the morning it was announced, and then learn the deal team had been working on it for months,” said the St. Louis native. “I wanted to be in that room.”
That desire brought Ferguson to Haas, where he is pursuing a full-time MBA and has been selected as one of 13 recipients of the school’s 2026-27 Finance Fellowships. Ferguson is also earning a master’s in bioengineering even as he recruits for investment banking roles, with a focus on healthcare. “I can already reason about the science and the technology,” he said. “The finance skill set is what I am here to build.”
This year’s class of Finance Fellows has gravitated toward investment banking, said William Rindfuss, managing director of Strategic Programs in the Haas Finance Group. All five of the IB Fellows, two C&J White Fellows, and the Evening and Weekend MBA Finance Fellow are pursuing that path, focused on the Bay Area offices of bulge-bracket and elite boutique banks. Haas again had the highest market share of summer associates starting their careers in investment banking in the Bay Area market, and many international students studying finance at Haas are on that path.
“Around half of our Finance Fellows this year came to Haas from outside the US,” said Rindfuss. “That tracks with these banks’ openness to hire such candidates, who often bring finance experience from other financial centers or from tech and life sciences companies around the world. We’re an ecosystem for this.”
Fellows are chosen based on their preparedness and promise in achieving their career goals in finance, including the clarity of their path toward those goals. The fellows receive a scholarship award and are assigned a Haas alumni mentor, ranging from a recent graduate to a senior executive working in the Fellows’ finance field of interest.
The 2026-2027 Finance Fellows include:
IB Fellows:
Jacky Chen, Adam Ferguson, Vivian Ji, Richard Lee, and Brian Oh
Entrepreneurial Finance Fellows:
Claire Blazewicz, Caroline Guirgis, Kayle Kane, and Olive Li
PE&IM Fellow:
Alessandra Bianco
EWMBA Finance Fellow:
Michael Carter
C&J White Fellows:
Henry Chen and Joseph Kang
Joseph Kang spent seven years in commercial real estate investing in Korea, most recently as an associate director at a REIT management firm, where his work included analyzing tenants. He was struck by the pace of change among the tech companies in his portfolio, which included Coupang, the Korean e-commerce company. He visited their distribution centers regularly. “The first year, there were just automated systems with sorters and conveyor belts. The next year, out of the blue, AI robots started to move things across the floor. I even saw them start to test self-driving trucks,” Kang said. “The real estate we were providing remained largely the same, while the operations inside were evolving rapidly. That contrast really stayed with me.”
Kang wanted to be closer to the strategic decisions shaping technology companies’ growth. He chose Haas, over other top MBA programs he was admitted to for its focus on technology and its investment banking track. He is now recruiting for tech investment banking as a C&J White Finance Fellow.
Caroline Guirgis spent nearly four years in KPMG’s ESG data advisory practice in Chicago and New York, working with large financial institutions to measure their greenhouse gas emissions, implement software to automate tracking, and produce sustainability reports disclosing their decarbonization goals and progress. She later joined Workiva, an enterprise SaaS company that produces financial and sustainability reports, as a Solution Engineer on their growth team. There she translated large enterprise clients’ sustainability reporting needs driven by an evolving regulatory environment into product requirements.
As her role expanded beyond sustainability into broader regulatory reporting, the Southern California native saw the dual MBA/Master of Climate Solutions degree as an opportunity to jump back into the climate space. “I loved my experience advising as a sustainability consultant, then building as an operator at a climate tech, and now I’m eager to play a role in funding the next generation of breakthroughs to accelerate the energy transition,” she said.
Guirgis was drawn to Berkeley by the school’s dual degree program, as well as California’s reputation as a national leader on climate. “Here I am exposed to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, which is really exciting,” she said.
An internship at MassChallenge, a Boston startup accelerator, during her undergrad prompted Guirgis to apply for the Berkeley SkyDeck Venture Fellowship, where she and five colleagues source early-stage startups and pitch them to the investment team. This experience led her to apply for the Fall Finance Fellowship. After graduation, she hopes to join a climate-focused venture capital fund that invests in early-stage companies.
Source: newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu
