An investment in her future

Jennifer DeSisto (BS 1997) wasn’t your typical Beaverton, Oregon, high schooler. Fascinated by the burgeoning local establishments gaining popularity, she shrewdly decided to purchase something more than that trendy Starbucks latte, Nordstrom outfit, or cool pair of Nikes.

“I would use my babysitting money to buy those stocks,” she laughingly recalled. “They were in their early days. I got interested in what they were doing and started following them.”

When exploring college, the math-savvy student chose Carnegie Mellon, one of the “best business schools and with a quantitative bent,” and ultimately graduated with a double major in industrial management and economics.

Since then, the W.L. Mellon Society member has been a consistent, generous supporter of the Tepper School.

I feel incredibly fortunate for my CMU education,” stressed DeSisto, now the Chief Investment Officer of Anchor Capital Advisors. “It’s gotten me to the places I’ve reached, and I feel it’s so important to give back.

After the Tepper School, DeSisto began her finance career in Citibank’s management training program, excited to rotate through all parts of the bank. She next worked on leveraged buyouts for then-Bank of Boston, and after the dot-com bust, turned to restructuring those deals, gaining valuable quantitative modeling experience. 

Looking for a change, DeSisto earned her MBA and, returning to her early interests, joined a quantitative investment firm, soon becoming a global investment portfolio manager. Following the 2008 financial crisis, she moved on to a private investment firm. 

“I was hired to revamp the whole investment process,” she explained, “It was like a puzzle putting together all these asset classes and managers to deliver a risk-adjusted return that exceeded expenses for our clients. I loved it — and I’m still doing that now!” 

In 2016, she joined Anchor, where she again successfully overhauled the business. 

“My quantitative background taught me to put an investment process in place that could be repeated, implementing a model in a more rigorous, process-oriented way,” she noted. “I also introduced new asset classes and shifted the business by creating a new wealth management platform.” 

Today, she oversees a $9 billion firm advising and managing funds for both institutional and private clients. DeSisto doesn’t hesitate to express her gratitude to the Tepper School, where she still returns to present to classes and to recruit students. 

“It taught me critical thinking,” she said. “Professors and classmates forced you to ask the how and why, and come up with a solution — and that’s so powerful. A lot of people can’t think through different problems in different environments, and Tepper really did that for me. I’m truly appreciative of that.”

“The quantitative training is also huge and such a critical skill for my job,” she continued. “I was there in the ’90s when the internet was young, and CMU was definitely well ahead of other universities.” DeSisto forged lifelong friendships with classmates over late-night study sessions and noted her admiration for the students and faculty — “brilliant people,” whom she found nevertheless humble and hard-working. “This business is very humbling,” she acknowledged. “The markets do what they’re going to do. You’re not going to have all the answers, so you just have to be humble and work through it. That’s something you learn at Tepper.”