The 10-week internship Addison Eaker completed with Wells Fargo in the summer between her junior and senior years at UMSL led to a full-time job she’ll start in late July. Eaker will also be taking classes part-time in the Accelerated Master’s program. (Photo by Derik Holtmann)
Addison Eaker was only about a week into classes at the University of Missouri–St. Louis when she realized her UMSL experience was about to dramatically expand her horizons.
After she indicated an interest in finance in her enrollment forms, Timothy Dombroski, an assistant professor of finance in the College of Business Administration, reached out to Eaker to ask if she was interested in not only joining the Finance Club but joining an executive board that had lost most of its members to graduation. She accepted the invitation to meet with Dombroski, and it wasn’t long until Eaker was vice president of the club.
She had finished her associate degree at St. Charles Community College taking exclusively online classes, so this was a giant step out of her comfort zone. She relished the opportunity, though, and after a year as vice president, she filled the role of president of the Finance Club for her senior year.
“Being able to make connections, such as asking speakers to come to the school by reaching out to executives from different companies, that has obviously helped build my skills and my confidence as well,” she said. “Looking back, I’m really glad I did it, but at the time, it was definitely pretty frightening. But like the expression says, nothing worth doing is easy.”
Eaker graduated magna cum laude last month with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, with a concentration in finance in the Investment and Portfolio Management track. After completing her walk across the commencement stage, Eaker is now getting set to start her new job at Wells Fargo in July while also continuing her UMSL journey in the Accelerated Master’s program this fall, pursuing her master’s in fintech, or financial technology.
Eaker, who received the Outstanding Student Award for Undergraduates Majoring in Finance, is used to keeping a busy schedule. In addition to serving on the Finance Club board, Eaker was part of the Pierre Laclede Honors College, the Finance Department Advisory Board, the Boeing Mentorship Program and the Dean’s Student Advisory Board with College of Business Administration Dean Shu Schiller.
“The dean will present issues like, ‘We’re trying to achieve this goal, and we want to know how you would go about it. What do you think of this process?’” Eaker said. “Or, ‘We’re choosing between two alternatives. What would a student prefer?’ So not only do I get to see what’s going on with the inner workings of the college, but I get to affect change and help make decisions. That’s been a really valuable experience for me.”
She’s starting her new job at Wells Fargo in late July. That full-time offer was an extension of a 10-week internship she did between her junior and senior years.
“I’ll be in a rotational program within their wealth and investment management operations division,” Eaker said. “I’m starting in collateral management, and I’ll be doing something different every six months for two years, so I’ll get a pretty holistic view of their operations department. I would like to eventually go into some sort of leadership position in finance. That’s my plan.”
Like many UMSL students, Eaker’s path from high school to college to career was a nonlinear journey. She graduated from Francis Howell North High School and initially enrolled at Southeast Missouri State University in 2014 to pursue vocal performance, but she quickly realized that wasn’t what she wanted as a career path. She took some time away from school to reevaluate, and while working as a restaurant server during the COVID-19 pandemic, she realized she needed to make a change. The experience as a server was valuable, though.
“Absolutely,” she said. “It helps develop skills like multitasking, interpersonal communication and conflict resolution. And just reading people in general – you have to do a lot of that.”
She started taking general education classes at SCC, then followed in her mother’s footsteps by choosing UMSL – Beth Coonen earned her MBA from UMSL in 2009. Being involved outside of classes wasn’t something she anticipated, but she was willing to say “yes” to opportunities.
“That’s one thing I really do appreciate about UMSL; it feels like faculty are super involved in clubs and extracurricular activities,” Eaker said. “We have these case competitions, where you go and work in a team to solve a case; a lot of professors are involved with helping students with that, along with their research and their classes. I don’t know how they do it all, but it seems like every professor has their hands in multiple baskets, just trying to help students in all different ways.”
Eaker said Jill Bernard Bracy, an associate teaching professor, was especially helpful as she learned to think analytically and creatively, particularly in regard to finance and financial modeling.
“She is one of my favorite professors at UMSL,” Eaker said. “One of our final projects for the quantitative methods for business class, we were supposed to work in groups to figure out, based on statistics, which was the best basketball player, so she gave us this huge data file. We have been training all semester to know how to clean the data, sort it, figure out what it means, analyze it. Our group did the solution differently than the other groups, but she really liked it, and she encouraged us to continue with it. She didn’t penalize us for not doing it the standard way. She really encouraged us to think outside the box and ask the question, ‘Is there a better way to solve this than we’ve been doing it the past few years?’”
Eaker is leaving her mark on the UMSL Business community. Quite literally, actually. Eaker is one of nine current and former students with their pictures on the windows of Anheuser-Busch Hall, home of the College of Business Administration.
“It was a bit of a shock because they didn’t tell me it was going up,” Eaker said with a laugh. “I got to school one day, and I ran into Eboni Valentine, who works closely with Dean Schiller, and she was like, ‘Hey, you’re on the wall. Go look outside.’ I was like, ‘What does that mean?’ It’s such an honor. I love it.”
