A Day in the Life: Madeleine Yi ’25

8:00 a.m.

I have an 8:30 a.m. class, so I stop at McNay Café most mornings for an iced coffee with milk and a snack. That morning I met up with a couple friends, Kyle Underwood, Lauren D'Souza, and Varun Pitta. We were in the red cohort together last year together, and we became pretty close by doing investment banking recruiting together. Now we’re all taking Corporate Finance.

8:30 a.m.

Corporate Finance is an elective that touches on topics like valuation methods, mergers and acquisitions, and capital restructuring. Next year, I’ll be working within the M&A advisory practice at a large bank, and I want to have a solid understanding of how C-suite leaders are thinking before I get there. I’m also taking classes on private equity and global financial crises this year in order to be as prepared as possible for the job.

Heather Tookes is the professor in this class, and she’s awesome. What I really appreciate is that she cites a lot of studies and academic papers that explain the phenomena we see in the finance industry. It’s great to have that context for the concepts we’re learning in class.

11:30 a.m.

When class ended, Lauren and I went down to the courtyard, where there was pizza sponsored by Alumni Relations. It’s actually pretty common that some sort of event brings the whole school together for lunch in the courtyard, especially while the weather is nice—we have cookouts when we all return to campus and during International Week, for example. These are pretty fun because you get to run into a lot of friends you didn’t plan to see. It was a beautiful day so we grabbed a table and sat outside.

12:00 p.m.

After lunch, I had a call with the bank I’ll be working at next year to check in and see how the year’s going. My team there has been great about keeping in touch during the year. I interned with this bank over the summer and got to know a lot of people, but they’ve been connecting me with others I didn’t get to meet, and it’s given me the chance to learn more about the bank and the job.

I took the call in one of the rooms in the interview suite. The rooms are super easy to book, and I do a lot of my calls there, especially when they’re with an employer. Now that I’m a second-year, I’m also helping out with the Finance Club, so I do mock interviews here to help first-year students prepare for their own interviews.

12:45 p.m.

When I have 15 or 20 minutes to spare between meetings or class, I like to stop at the student lounge because I know I’ll run into friends. It’s a gathering place in Evans Hall where people hang when they have free time. I saw Lauren again, as well as my friends Camila Novo-Viano and Miguel Zaldivar-Guiffredi. We all met early during our first year at a game night hosted in Evans Hall.

1:00 p.m.

From the student lounge, I headed to my next class, Global Financial Crisis. The structure of this course is unique: it lasts a full semester, and we watch modules online to learn content so that we can devote the whole class to discussion topics. It makes the class super interactive. That day we were talking about one of the questions I’d submitted about the 2008 housing crisis. The class is co-taught by Timothy Geithner, who was secretary of the treasury under President Obama, and Andrew Metrick, who is a faculty member here and so knowledgeable on the topic—you can ask him a random question about any financial crisis in history, and he’ll be able to answer.

2:20 p.m.

On the way out of class, I stopped to catch up with my friend Sreesha Sivakumar. We both interned at the same bank last summer and are currently helping first-years with the recruiting process, so we were chatting about strategy for that. I’m vice president of the Finance Club, which prepares students for finance careers and helps first-years land internships. Then I met my friend Servando Cervantes Carbajal, who is the treasurer of the Finance Club. We walked a block to G Café to grab coffee and have our weekly club leadership meeting. That day, we were talking through the logistics of matching first-year students with second-year mentors, and planning a full day of mock interviews.

We also happened to run into last year’s Finance Club president, Stephen Potts. A lot of banks come to visit campus this time of year, and he was in town to help out with recruiting.

3:30 p.m.

After our meeting, I walked to Bass Library. I had a paper due the next day, and I like to go there to focus when I have a lot of work to do. It’s quiet and the people there are super focused, which helps me get in the zone. I also like to switch up my location occasionally—Yale has such a beautiful campus, and I’m trying to take advantage of it as much as possible before I graduate.

7:15 p.m.

Back at Evans Hall, I helped lead our weekly Finance Club meeting. We usually see between 40 and 50 first-year students attend every week. The students get to know each other really well through these meetings, and it becomes a source of emotional support for them as well. When I was going through the recruiting process last year, I relied heavily on second-year students for advice, so I really feel a sense of wanting to give back.

We always start with a vibe check survey, which helps to show people they’re not alone if they’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed. At this session, we gave the students feedback about their coffee chats and the general recruiting process. The banks will often give us advice or tips that we can pass on to the first-years.

When the meeting ended, I headed to visit some friends in the Wooster Square neighborhood. My friends Clara Usandizaga Prat and Alejandra Lopez Valdes live there, and they were hosting a ladies’ wine night with snacks and fun drinks. One of my favorite things to do here is gather at someone’s house. On the weekends I might be more out and about, but after a long day it’s really nice to just sit down, chat, and relax.