With a mind set on both interrogating gender equity issues on a global scale and experiencing all the adventure the world held for her, Mariya Rosberg thought she would be just a wanderer. Over time, structure imposed itself on her, first by an unexpected work path and then motherhood. Find out how sometimes listening to that which calls you to venture out and applying it closer to home can do a world of good.
Guest Mariya Rosberg felt as though she had lived a somewhat sheltered beginning of life. At college, she leaned into everything that could expand her world, from languages to travel and found herself particularly drawn to ideas around gender equity. She married classwork in gender studies with real-world applications both on campus and abroad. She always felt the pull to adventure and believed she would just follow her free spirit into the life of a wanderer.
After a little independent travel, she landed in the only spot that made sense to that free spirit: Manhattan’s West Village. She steeped herself in the city’s history and the romantic notions of having a shared lived experience with countless other free spirits. Yet she also felt she needed to “get serious.” She answered an ad in the newspaper and began a life in management consulting. Interestingly, she was able to feed her wanderlust through her international clients and started putting some sort of structure to her life. Adding motherhood to the mix allowed her to confront the gender issues that had long interested her. Eventually she was able to marry this with her business life and mentor others who were trying to do it all.
In this episode, find out from Mariya how sometimes listening to that which calls you to venture out and applying it closer to home can do a world of good…on ROADS TAKEN...with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode's Guest
Mariya Rosberg has over 20 years of experience serving leading investment and universal banks in the US, Europe, and Latin America. She is currently a partner at Oliver Wyman, where she is head of Americas Corporate and Institutional Banking and also helps drive crucial decisions for the future of the firm, particularly mentoring colleagues navigating parenthood and consulting. For these and other Herculean efforts she was named a Working Mother of the Year by Working Mother magazine. She lives in Westchester County with her husband and their twins.
Mentioned in This Episode
"Research Shows People Become Increasingly Unhappy Until Age 47.2. Here's How to Minimize the Negative Effect of the 'Happiness Curve'" by Jeff Haden in Inc.com based on research by Dartmouth's David Blanchflower, published by National Bureau of Economic Research as a working paper entitled "Is Happiness U-Shaped Everywhere? Age and Subjective Happiness in 132 Countries."
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Mariya Rosberg: Being able to…particularly for women and people from less represented groups in my firm…help them to kind of discover their potential and find a road and understand that yes, you can have a family and do these kinds of jobs, and there is a network of women that will help each other. And it's kind of great to…be able to sort of put my head above the parapet a little bit and see that we can get there.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: With a mind set on both interrogating gender equity issues on a global scale and experiencing all the adventure the world held for her, Mariya Rosberg thought she would be just a wanderer. Over time, structure imposed itself on her, first by an unexpected work path and then motherhood. Find out how sometimes listening to that which calls you to venture out and applying it closer to home can do a world of good…on today’s Roads Taken, with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today, I'm here with my friend, Mariya Rosberg and we are going to talk about the steps we take and the leaps we take. And it is just so lovely to see you again. Mariya, welcome.
MR: Nice to see you too, Leslie. This is a great opportunity for some introspection that we don't often get to sit back and do so. Thank you for having me.
LJR: Well, we're going to roll right into it then. So here are the first two questions and they are, when we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
MR: And that is quite a question. Set of questions. Well, I guess like many of us, when I arrived, I really had no idea who I was going to be. I came from Minnesota and my kids like to tease me now about the story that I actually wore a cowboy hat on the first day of Dartmouth—this was way before, you know, cowboy hats were cool—and had been really very sheltered and had kind of a very quiet kind of a studious childhood. And I was so excited to be at Dartmouth. I had never really spent any time on the east coast before. And I was sure I was going to have all sorts of adventures and I did, you know. Incredibly eye-opening for me. I found these students from the east coast who had grown up in big cities to be super worldly and sophisticated. And I was kind of overwhelmed by some of the experiences and mature attitudes that they had. So I feel like the first couple months of Dartmouth were really just a fire hose for me, as I'm sure they were for many of us. And I really didn't know what I was going to find that I was going to be passionate about.
I found, you know, a lot of things at Dartmouth that really inspired me. I loved the school. I made a lot of great friends as many of us did. I really kind of ignited a lifelong interest and passion for gender equity issues through some of the classes that we took. But also I think just experiencing Dartmouth as a young woman who came from a very, you know, kind of not traditional, but sheltered background was pretty startling.
And, you know, I wish that I knew then what I know now. Gave me a lot of lessons that I would impart to my own daughter, but that I found kind of set me in a direction where I was really interested in understanding how, you know, women versus men kind of experienced some of these traditional settings like the university, like Dartmouth. And then I got into some of the coursework and I did some extracurricular activities and volunteering some travel that came later, but that was one of the things that I really found about myself at Dartmouth. And then I also just found this massive love for the world and for travel and languages and exploration, which I kind of knew was in there before I arrived. But it just like exploded when I was exposed to all of those things. And I remember the first time I saw New York City was actually Thanksgiving break freshman year, going home with a friend to Westchester where I live now and passing the city in the distance and being like, that's it, that's where I'm going to go. That's where I'm going to live my life.
And then I also really loved the travel experiences I had while I was at Dartmouth. So one of them, of course, the time that we shared in Italy, our language study abroad, which was probably still one of the best handful of weeks I've ever had. It was just sort of magical.
But then I also did my own sorta trip. Junior year I felt like I really just needed to get off campus. It was like deep, New Hampshire winter, and I needed another sort of jolt of adventure before I was done with my college experience, I thought, so I created this trip of my own, where I spent some time in Argentina and I found a shelter for women who were homeless and pregnant. And they basically would come to this shelter, have their babies, and then learn skills so that they could find work afterwards. And we helped with like prenatal care and taking care of their other children and then education around…a lot of it was like household management tasks, a little bit of language, typing, things like that.
So I was there for about three months volunteering and living in Buenos Aires. And that was a truly meaningful and kind of amazing experience that has stayed with me for many years. But after that, when I came back and had just a great senior year, I was pretty sure that I was going to be this free spirit, you know, kind of wandering, traveling, working in some form of women's issues. Really didn't have any plans. And it's remarkable now, cause I actually have this very sort of structured job now. And I work with a lot of people who are doing internships from colleges or, you know, just coming out of undergrad for the first time and getting their first jobs. And they were so planned and they have these fantastic resumes and these well-wrought ambitions. You know, sort of plans for where they're going to go in the future. And I contrast that to what I thought I was going to be when I left, but then it's pretty different. So I think I thought I would be just a wanderer. And luckily, I found a path eventually.
LJR: Yeah, that is so interesting, Moriaya. Usually I don't inject my memories of people so much. But when you first said, oh, I came from Minnesota and this sheltered…I wrote “sheltered? Sophitacated” And then you said all these other people were sophisticated. And I remember thinking of you as like, oh my gosh, she is so polished and she can talk, you know, empowerment when I didn't even know what empowerment meant. And then you were this wandering free spirit and it was this mélange of like, uber-city sophistication and like bon vivant scarves in the wind. So I think it's so funny how we see ourselves than how others might…I mean, and I'm just one person kind of glimpsing that. But I am dying to hear when someone has that, “I'm just going to be a free spirit,” how structure kind of moves in even despite oneself. So talk me through those first couple of adventures post-college.
MR: Yeah, no, it is. It's amazing how life whittles you into a vein after a while. And it's a good thing. So I traveled a little bit more after school, after college ended and eventually did of course land in New York, which was what I had really wanted to do. I tended bar for awhile at a bar in Soho tha, as a sign of the arc of our lives, is now a Maclaren stroller store, which I always think is it was like this dark and gritty corner of Soho back then.
LJR: I was about to say the bartending sounds right. I don't know about the McLaren, but okay.
MR: I lived in the west village and I had a fantastic time, just absolutely falling in love with the city. I was, I read a ton about the history of New York and I got really into kind of the layers of lives experienced in this very small, condensed space. And I just loved living there. But then I sort of realized, okay, it's time to get serious. So I actually applied to an ad in the New York Times in the job section and ended up, as if like an irresistible magnetic pull for everyone of our generation, into management consulting, which I feel like is kind of this catch-all for people…t least when we were out of college who were still trying to sort of figure out what to do with their degrees. And my degree was in history. So I could go in a lot of different directions. So I started working at a consulting firm and found that I actually really liked it. It was kind of logic and puzzles and problem solving and tons of variety of different people and different experiences.
I started working a lot in financial services and in those days a lot of the stuff happening in the industry was really around market infrastructure sort of changing and the advent of electronification and sort of the guts of how the securities industry work was transforming. The types of projects I got to do were really cool. They were, you know, first stock exchanges or sort of new trading networks or industry utilities all over the world. So I spent some time in Zurich and Hong Kong and London, and it was just fun. Like I found myself really interested in it and liking the people. So that actually was a good fit for awhile.
And I was thinking that I would go to graduate school and consider maybe moving into a more public sector focus because I still had this passion for Latin America and this passion for women's issues that I wanted to address. And then I went through the process of applying to graduate school and 9/11 happened and I, very much on the heels of that, met the man that I eventually would marry right before we both departed New York City to go to graduate school in different locations. And you know, I suppose again, like many in our kind of cohort, all those things kind of rattled me. And I kind of decided to stick with my vein. You know, it was working well for me. I was enjoying my career. I was doing well at it. I went to graduate school in Boston. I had a good couple of years there. I tested out some of that public sector stuff with some coursework and some internships, and I really found that I had grown to like the way decisions are made in the private sector. You know, there was kind of a speed and decisiveness that suited me and I felt like I had more to do there.
So when I graduated and moved back to New York City and wonderfully had managed to stay together with Andrew, my husband, during the tumultuous two years of graduate school with us commuting from Ann Arbor to Boston together. I went right back into consulting and financial services. And I've kind of been doing it ever since, which is remarkable to me because I did not have a math class in college. Not what I expected to have happened. But I did all that in graduate school. I sort of took all the finance and all that kind of good stuff. So it's been an extraordinary career.
And what I have managed to do over these 20 or so years that I've been working in kind of wholesale banking is actually find ways to bring sort of my passions into it. So I spent a couple of years, for example, building the Latin America business for Merrill Lynch. I was down in the region and I was helping to acquire local brokerages and build up local presence and you know, sort of bring the infrastructure of banking into parts of the world that maybe hadn't had as robust a system of financing for local businesses and that kind of thing.
And then, but really what's been kind of rewarding in the way this has all turned out is just the longevity of being in an industry and being in a company. I've now been at Oliver Wyman where I work now for a pretty long time. The longevity of being able to move from kind of line work to management and mentoring and helping lead groups of people and really just particularly for women and people from less represented groups in my firm…help them to kind of discover their potential and find a road and understand that yes, you can have a family and do these kinds of jobs. And there is a network of women that will help each other. And it's kind of great to at this point be able to sort of put my head above the parapet a little bit and see that, you know, we can get there. So that's been perhaps the most rewarding part of this career path that I've chosen.
And then I would be remiss if I didn't also talk about the sort of extraordinary advent of my children, which is the real thing that brings that kind of stability to life. I had twins 12 years ago going to girl and I took…I tried to go back to work after three. I kind of went in, I had to like put the paper on the windows of my office so I could pump and you know, the whole infrastructure there and I lasted about a week and then I just resigned.
And I was with the kids for two years, and then I started doing some independent consulting on my own. I started an LLC and then I swooped back into the formal job world about a year after that.
LJR: What was that decision-making process for the quitting. It was just, this is too overwhelming? Or you had a direct poll, like, was it more of a push, more of a pull?
MR: So I had my children right at the time of the financial crisis. So there was like a ton of the turmoil around my workplace already. And so it was not the worst time to sort of exit stage left for a couple of years. But really what happened with the children…I think it was Erica Meitner who came over when the babies were little. And she was like, it's like National Geographic in here. There's just stuff happening all at like two infants. It's a lot, a lot going on. It was [LJR: Body parts flying.] Very intense and my husband was amazing and we were really in it together. When you have two babies, everybody's, everybody's doing all this stuff. But it was exhausting. It was overwhelming. It was magnificent. And. You know, I just wasn't ready to be away from them. It just was too gut-wrenching for me. But, you know, everybody has their sort of way of finding that balance and what works for them. So again, you know, one of the things I do a lot now is, is, is work with other women in my firm who are and then as well, who are becoming parents and sort of figuring out how to navigate all of that with a very intense, you know, job that can be at times quite all-consuming. But for me, it just, it was not something that I was ready yet to balance emotionally or logistically. And so…
LJR: Yeah. That actually takes on a new shape to the gendered lens that you bring to things like seeing here I am in a position where I, I could keep going, but this is more important and this family is important. So that checks off like gender stuff. There's also that free spirit travel part, which I know kind of stinks when you have the littles. But tell me, I'm sure you've made the most of it with your family. How have you infused that part of, of old Mariya and your life? Now?
MR: Yeah. That's a great question. We have done our best. Our first trip with them. We were ambitious our first trip with them when they were less than one year old. And we went to the Caribbean was a real disaster. Nobody had a lot of fun on that one. But we've tried to go, you know, somewhere interesting with the kids at least every year. So they've been, they've been to, you know, Rome and they've been to Paris and they'd been to Siena in Italy where we did our study together and they've been to a few other places. And what I love doing with them is actually we'll pick sort of one place to go together. And then, as they've gotten older this has been easier to do, but we'll sort of let them select a couple of topics about the place to become expert in so that when we get there, they can kind of teach us about the language or the food or the dance or whatever thing they get excited about. So for me, that wanderlust, if you will, has moved into the planning phase, as much as in the actual experience.
And they're just really curious kids. I think the big thing is just it's that curiosity about the world and languages, which I always loved and, you know, reading and different literatures and learning about art and different parts of the world and everything. That's just really ultimately about curiosity. So as long as my kids have intellectual curiosity, I feel like I've done well. And that's also what I think with the people that I work with. You know, whenever someone comes in with a crazy background in—I guess now we think of liberal arts backgrounds as kind of unusual, but if they were like, I studied French literature or, you know, whatever—that's fine. And so if anyone is listening, who is plotting their next move after graduating from Dartmouth and wondering what the heck they're going to do with one of these marvelously interesting majors in liberal arts, you know, that's fine, it's fine. As long as you have that intellectual curiosity and are willing to learn the next thing, I still think there's nothing better than that.
So I guess that's a circuitous answer, but we've tried to keep it alive in practice and also in an approach to learning.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. Well, earlier I had said that your answers surprised me, but that doesn't surprise me at all. That really sums up who I think of when I think of Mariya that intellectually curious and willing to stand for something and see where an adventure goes. All of those things sound to the point.
MR: What I'm really excited about now and what I love with what you're doing, Leslie, is that the big, there's a big adventure to come still. So, you know, it sort of feels like this has been the second third of life for some reason to me. And I actually was. Reading recently, an article that another one of our classmates, Jennie Tranter, sent me as research by a Dartmouth professor. I can't remember the name of the professor right now, but basically this was like this very comprehensive research of people all over the world, normalizing for all sorts of social and economic factors. And this research found that the absolute nadir of a person's life, the point when they are at their most unhappy is that age 47.2, which is like exactly where we are. But it's exactly this moment where you kind of realize that all the other things you might've done, you know, those roads have kind of gone off and petered out. You know, it's remarkably consistent across cultures and socioeconomic brackets and all sorts of things. But the upside of that is we're back on the up now with this, this birthday for class of 96; here we go on the upswing and I'm pretty excited about the next chapter. I think what I've kind of gleaned from the road so far is that I do have some unfinished business and it is around, you know, focusing more directly on women and girls. And that's really what I want kind of the next chunk of my life to be about. So really happy to have had the career that I've had and that I’m having—which is very rewarding, but I'm excited to kind of take advantage of where that positions me to go next.
LJR: I love that. And I do think that the best is yet to come for all of us. And I certainly hope that for you this the first two-thirds haven't been so shabby, so hope the trajectory continues that way.
MR: Exactly.
LJR: Thanks so much for being here, Mariya.
MR: Oh my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
LJR: That was Mariya Rosberg, who has over 20 years of experience serving leading investment and universal banks in the US, Europe, and Latin America. She is currently a partner at Oliver Wyman, where she is head of Americas Corporate and Institutional Banking and also helps drive crucial decisions for the future of the firm and mentors colleagues navigating parenthood and consulting. For these and other Herculean efforts juggling life with twins, Working Mother magazine named her a Working Mother of the Year.
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