Before the Graduation Gala, We Asked Our Fellows 10 Questions. Here’s What They Told Us.
On May 6, ATLAS will gather at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to honor our graduating Fellows. Before this celebration, we wanted to hear from them directly. So, earlier this spring, we sent a set of questions to all 2022 Fellows, coast-to-coast: from University of Denver to Harvard to Tulane and beyond. These Fellows are first-generation college students and immigrants; children of carpenters and farmers; and young people from Chicago’s South Side and Queens.
Three common themes emerged from their responses.
The scholarship opens the door. The community is why they stay.
When we asked Fellows what they’d want an outsider to understand about ATLAS, almost all of them pointed to the same thing: the community.
Yoselyn Waterhouse, who will start her career at RBC this summer, told us the internships and the people around her have been the most meaningful parts of her ATLAS experience. Jonathon Han said he expected ATLAS to be a place to grow his professional network and instead found something much deeper—meaningful relationships with peers who will always have his back.
What our Fellows describe, again and again, is a community of people who genuinely want to see each other succeed. That’s what they carry with them.
They push each other.
Bryce Perkins calls it “collaborative competition.” Aryan Ruparel expected finance to feel cut-throat and instead found peers and underclassmen eager to help, whether that meant conducting mock interviews, sharing resources, or honest feedback. Andy Ochoa noticed that Fellows are always looking for the next thing that makes them stand out — new competitions, unusual hobbies, and degrees outside of business.
“I can’t believe I’m in this room.”
This feeling came up again and again. Jamal Matthew used it to describe sitting across from Scott Schroeder, a co-founding partner of Balyasny Asset Management, during his first first internship. For him–someone just beginning to explore finance, coming from a family of carpenters and farmers – it was a surreal experience. Natalia Ostapowicz remembered walking into the Balyasny office at 18 years old and seeing a desk with six monitors overlooking Central Park.
What moved me most in reading all of the responses was how Fellows described their own transformation: the rooms our Fellows now move through confidently were once entirely closed to them. On May 6, we’ll celebrate these Fellows at the Museum of Modern Art. They all will be in the room. This matters, because many of them didn’t always realize they belonged in spaces like this. That’s the heart of what we do at ATLAS: help brilliant, talented young people grow into opportunities they may not have imagined for themselves.
