Taking Chances and Giving Back

You might not think so to look at her resume, with high-level finance industry experience in the U.S. and internationally, but Carnegie Mellon University alumna Cynthia Wang has followed an unconventional path that has defied expectations in an often-conventional business.

But the common thread throughout her career has been her efforts to make a positive difference.

As a board member of the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute (GCCSI), she uses her unique mix of investment and governance expertise, knowledge of Chinese markets and communication skills to educate stakeholders on financial aspects of climate change issues.

Cynthia jokes that she has been somewhat of a rebel both in her career field and in a family of engineers.

Immediately after earning her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Cynthia set her sights on MBA programs. This was the first of a number of nontraditional steps, since at the time many MBA programs required applicants to have prior work experience.

This was part of the reason she came to the Tepper School of Business, which was then known as the Graduate School of Industrial Administration and admitted MBA students straight from undergrad. Plus, the name recognition of CMU in their field carried weight with her family of scientists and engineers.

“I think they were secretly hoping that eventually, I would either return to Silicon Valley — that’s where my parents were at the time — to work in the management side for a technology company or cross over to do something on the research side,” Cynthia says, noting that they were ultimately supportive of her choice to pursue a career outside of engineering.

Shortly after she was accepted into the MBA program, Cynthia learned about a dual-degree program in which she also could earn a master’s degree in computational finance. The business and finance combination fit her interests, so she enrolled.

Taking a chance on a new opportunity

When Cynthia graduated in 1997, she began working as a floor trader for Chase Securities (now JP Morgan Chase & Co.), where she specialized in emerging market fixed-income derivatives. The position with a large and stable East Coast firm was “exactly the thing I was trying to do,” Cynthia says.

After a while, though, although she enjoyed the work and did well there, Cynthia wanted more.

“There was something that was missing in the daily work that I felt that was also important to me, which was the human interface of things,” Cynthia says. “And somehow, I craved that.”

For about the next 15 years, Cynthia lived and worked in Asia, where she held positions in investment banking and advising with Chinese and European firms.

“That part of my career was focused on helping companies raise capital, either in Asia or in the U.S., or advising international companies to invest in China or partner with Chinese companies across different industries,” she says.

She also honed communication skills and a multinational perspective that have become important assets to her current advocacy work.

Educating on finance in climate change

In 2018, a chance encounter led Cynthia to move back to the U.S. to lead Chinese client relations for U.S.-based asset management firm Bridgewater Associates as head of China institutional clients.

Eventually, Cynthia was also tapped to join the board of GCCSI. She jumped at the chance to use her investment and human relations background for a think tank with a mission she supports, fighting climate change and supporting climate neutrality.

Cynthia had worked in investment banking with a variety of energy companies, and she also understood infrastructure. Her finance background gave her knowledge that many in the climate change sphere from scientific and technical backgrounds lack. In addition, her experience with Chinese government and markets was a major asset for an organization hoping to tackle long-term structural change on an international scale.

Cynthia is helping GCCSI be a resource to potential investors in alternative energies. She also helps the organization work with governments and social sector stakeholders. The role combines Cynthia’s communication and quantitative skills as she helps with messaging and measurable evaluations in a non-standardized industry.

Aside from the intellectual challenge, Cynthia’s decision to sign on with GCCSI also was motivated by her desire to use her skills to make a positive difference in the field of climate change.

“People in finance, we think we’re all encompassing, but at the end of the day, how much difference do we really make?” Cynthia asks. “So in a way, I do want to be able to explain to my kids what I do and make them proud of it.”

Cynthia is passionate about sustainability and after talking with Lester and Judith Lave Professor of Economics, Engineering and Public Policy Nicholas Z. Muller about the Tepper School Sustainability Initiative that he leads, she made a lead gift to establish and endow the Carnegie Mellon Sustainability Innovation Fund.

She hopes that other alumni will join her in supporting the school’s efforts in the impactful field. The fund will provide support to research, faculty and student activities; other sustainability related opportunities at the Tepper School of Business and collaborative campus projects in the sustainability area.

According to Cynthia, one of the challenges of sustainability initiatives has been the difficulty quantifying them. And if it’s difficult to measure the problem and potential solutions, it also will be difficult to hold investors, companies and governments accountable.

She says Carnegie Mellon is a good fit for quantifiable sustainability initiatives.

For example, she has been impressed with Muller’s work on the ESG Index, a multidisciplinary initiative to help asset managers make investment decisions and regulators form standardized disclosure requirements through quantifiable information.

“CMU is the pioneer in management science,” Cynthia notes. She hopes that the new fund will promote initiatives like the ESG Index because “we can see the outcome, and then we can direct capital toward those programs that give us the maximum outcome” to promote sustainability.

Reflecting on her career so far, Cynthia says she embraced a variety of opportunities that might not seem so straightforward but ultimately fit her strengths and interests as well as her overarching purpose.

“You can always learn more from people who are outside of your immediate neighborhood or communities, and that gives you perspective,” she says. “With more perspectives or some more understanding of the differences in people and culture, we do see more about the so-called ‘truth.’”

Cynthia says the chances she has taken, colleagues she’s met, and places she’s lived have given her not only professional satisfaction, but also personal fulfillment.

“Professionally, of course, that hopefully makes me a better adviser to my clients, and also a better listener to my friends and family,” she says.

An unconventional school for an unconventional career

Cynthia credits Carnegie Mellon for the foresight of embracing students who did not have a cookie-cutter background for the MBA program.

In addition, the MBA program offered cross-departmental opportunities to learn skills that are important but not so obvious. As an example, she points to her Acting for Business class. Taught by an instructor from the School of Drama, the course emphasized skills necessary to be in the spotlight and handle publicity. To this day, Cynthia uses skills she learned in the class when she gives high-stakes presentations for work.

“As someone who hadn’t really worked before, [it] really helped me prepare for a lot of the real-life scenarios in banking,” she notes.

While an acting course isn’t something one might expect from “a very quantitative and engineering-oriented school” like CMU, Cynthia says it fits the school’s personality, which emphasized practical skills.

“I think culturally CMU kind of influenced me, as an engineering school, because it’s more about the deeds, not about the words,” she says.

Giving back through mentoring

As a student in the mid-1990s, Cynthia was one of the youngest in her MBA class. She benefitted from the advice she received from classmates — some of whom were decades older than her — and CMU advisors. While she could have been at a disadvantage looking for her first position after earning her MBA, she says their guidance put her in a good position to land and succeed at her first job.

As a result, mentoring is important to Cynthia today. When she lived in China, she served on the board of the International School of Beijing, the largest international prep school in China. Now, she is on the Alumni Board of the CMU Master of Science in Computational Finance program. In these and other roles, she provides not only individual mentorship as a woman with extensive experience in finance but also perspective on larger structural issues in diversity and inclusion.

“I do take every opportunity that the school offers me to mentor students,” Cynthia says. This includes sharing her experience in webinars and workshops, as well as many informal mentoring relationships with CMU students and young professionals she’s met through her work.

Throughout her career, Cynthia has had the confidence to take chances and follow her skills and interests into positions that have played out in positive ways not only for her but also for the causes she’s championed.

“I’ve had the fortune of going into random opportunities and taking that leap of faith,” she says.

Recently, Cynthia was back on CMU’s campus to take her 16-year-old daughter to the summer Pre-College Program in 2022. She is internally “cheering” for her daughter to consider CMU for college, but says she doesn’t want to pressure her.

“I really appreciate a CMU education,” she says. “When I took my daughter back to CMU to drop her off, I was able to tour a few departments with her, and it was just amazing how the school has really kind of taken advantage of its strengths and built a unique platform because of its smaller size, and its more independent, non-commercial, and non-political tradition.”