Where it started
Undergrad · Finance 101
"I'm going to work you so hard, you're going to hate me."
That's how my finance professor, Mr. Hatem, introduced himself on day one of undergrad. He wasn't exaggerating — the course was brutal. But somewhere in the middle of all that difficulty, something unexpected happened: I fell in love with it. By the end of the semester, Mr. Hatem and I had actually become close, despite — or maybe because of — how hard he pushed us.
That class taught me two things. First, I didn't actually know anything about the finance industry. Second, neither did anyone in my immediate circle. I'd grown up with no real exposure to investing, markets, or wealth-building — and suddenly I was staring at a world I'd never been shown.
I fell in love with the data tracking, the numbers, the possible returns, the history behind it all, the prediction of where it was headed, the cycles of the different markets you could trade in. It pulled me in completely. That curiosity is what pushed me to go self-educate — to learn this complex world well enough that I could take it apart and hand it back to people in a way they could actually understand. That's still the work I do today, whether I'm sitting across from a client or behind a camera.