Here’s a testimonial from another alumni, Serena Ng. You can catch a video of her here.
Before moving to New York in the fall of 2004, I was a reporter for a business newspaper in Singapore, writing two or three news stories a day about local companies plus the occasional feature or commentary. I enjoyed the work, but felt I lacked the knowledge to dig deeper into many subjects, to analyze financial transactions, and to write about complex topics in a clear and engaging way. The BER program equipped me with the skills I needed and taught me the fundamentals of corporate finance, accounting and economics. I also picked up some valuable investigative-reporting techniques.
During a 10-week summer internship at the WSJ in 2005, I learned how to develop unique story ideas and wrote features about Wall Street stock research, mergers and insider trading. I was hired by the Journal in January 2006 to cover the U.S. credit markets. It was an area I knew very little about at the time, and I spent months learning about it by meeting with dozens of money managers, bankers and other professionals and asking them to describe what they did for a living and what they thought were important issues in their space. Back then, companies and individuals were in a borrowing binge and Wall Street banks were churning out a myriad of complex financial instruments and selling them to global investors, who had a seemingly endless amount of money to invest.
That all came to a head when the subprime mortgage market turned south in 2007 and subsequently dragged the rest of the markets down with it. The credit crisis gave me the opportunity to write many stories that analyzed the causes and effects of the downturn, and to investigate what led to the excesses at some of the world’s best- known financial institutions.
If not for the fellowship, I wouldn’t have been able to help chronicle an important part of the world’s financial history. In my opinion, the WSJ fellowship isn’t a free ticket to a plum reporting job; rather, it gives reporters an opportunity to learn more about covering business, to pursue more in-depth reporting, and to work with many top-notch editors and reporters, whether they are professors in the BER program or colleagues at an internship or job. It can also open doors to new possibilities.
