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. The same class I thought I would dread turned out to be the one that changed my direction.
That experience taught me two things. First, I realized I didn't actually know anything about the finance industry. Second, neither did anyone in my immediate circle. I had grown up with no real exposure to investing, markets, or wealth-building, and suddenly I was staring at a world nobody had ever shown me.
I fell in love with the data tracking, the numbers, the possible returns, the history behind it all, the way markets cycle and shift and repeat themselves. It pulled me in completely. That curiosity 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 use. That is still the work I do today, whether I'm sitting across from a client or in front of a camera.