Sonia

I grew up in Pullman, Washington, the lentil capital of the world. It’s a tiny town on the border of Washington and Idaho of about 30,000 people, including Washington State University. There is a lentil festival that occurs every August—but garbanzos may be taking over as the bigger agricultural product now, given the hummus craze!

I’m a managing director in the Healthcare Investment Banking Group, primarily covering biopharma—biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. It’s an exciting and important sector to cover. Our clients, whether young or established, spend every day working hard to tackle significant unmet medical needs in healthcare today.    

I attended Brown University as an undergrad and studied community health—the education at Brown is liberal arts and very multidisciplinary. After graduating, I was a healthcare strategy consultant before attending business school at MIT Sloan—which I chose specifically because I wanted to go into healthcare finance. 

After a few years of consulting, I wanted to pursue something a bit more tangible, more focused on the markets, and driven by real-time execution. I interned at Goldman Sachs in the summer of 2011 in the Healthcare Group within the Investment Banking Division in New York, joined as a full-time associate in the fall of 2012, moved to San Francisco in the spring of 2015, and have been out here ever since, as a vice president and now a managing director. 

At all stages of my career at Goldman Sachs, I have loved the tangible nature of my job. We build meaningful relationships with our clients over the long term, all the while being ready to assist when execution windows open (and just as often close) quickly in conjunction with the fast pace of the markets. As a consultant, there’s generally one project at a time—perhaps a long, in-depth study. In banking, we work with multiple clients simultaneously on ideas, strategy, and corporate finance. In parallel, if any of them want to do a deal, we aim to be instrumental in execution. I think Goldman Sachs in particular is very rigorous about making sure we help our clients think through the right decisions for the near and long-term.

Within the Investment Banking Division, we’re set up in a matrix. There are industry groups, such as healthcare, consumer, TMT, FIG, natural resources and industrials on one axis, while on the other axis are the product groups, like equity capital markets, debt capital markets and structured finance. At Goldman, everyone within these industry groups works on deals alongside all of the product groups. Also, M&A is nested in the individual industry groups, meaning that all junior bankers can work on live M&A deals, not just a separate M&A team. That’s really fun, because it’s a classic part of the business. 

Companies and organizations need financing and M&A to grow, to develop and to achieve their goals. We help them do that. It goes back to the Goldman Sachs’ business principles and always putting the client first. It’s really exciting to watch something that your team has worked very hard on come to fruition in the marketplace in a way that makes a positive impact for your client.