The Apprentice: How This Zicklin Alum Built Multiple Internships into a BlackRock Career

Many Zicklin students work two or three internships while getting their BBAs. But six?

That’s what Ramgelly Espinosa (BBA, ’23) did. Through six internships, she developed professional networks and gained invaluable insights into the finance world that she used to launch her finance career at BlackRock.

In the beginning there was Project Destined, a program Ramgelly joined in high school that trains students in real estate, entrepreneurship, and financial literacy. That experience eventually led to a summer internship with a small real estate company called Elite Realty Associates. But even before that, she managed to complete two internships for Northwestern Mutual: a monthlong “winternship” as a financial representative during the January school break, followed by a semester-long position. 

After her summer stint at the real estate company, Ramgelly returned to Zicklin for her junior year and spent the spring semester as a college assistant in the Weissman School’s Black and Latino Studies department. There was also an accounting internship with Highsnobiety, a marketing company, and we didn’t even talk about the two years she spent as a paid program management associate for a nonprofit, the Emerging Leaders Program, where she helped high schoolers in her South Bronx neighborhood land internships at finance powerhouses like JP Morgan and BlackRock. 

Speaking of BlackRock—one of the most coveted places to work for finance majors at the Zicklin School—Ramgelly also snagged a summer internship there. That eventually led to her current full-time job as a BlackRock risk and quantitative analysis analyst. She leaned on the Starr Career Development Center for resume and cover letter advice and practice preparing for interviews. In addition to the Starr Center, she credits her success at BlackRock—where she also won a $20,000 BlackRock Founders Scholarship—in part to a required essay she submitted about representing the BlackRock principles. 

“I wrote about [the principle of] being committed to a better future,” she says. She embodied this by somehow finding the time, on top of all her other responsibilities, to volunteer at her church mentoring younger teens.

Ramgelly says she knew since high school she wanted to study finance, so applying to Baruch and Zicklin made perfect sense. She believes her love for numbers comes from her experience emigrating from the Dominican Republic as a toddler and struggling to adapt to a new language. 

“I was always behind my peers in reading and writing,” she says. “My parents couldn’t help me with English, but my dad could always help me with my math homework.” But it wasn’t just about bean-counting: “With finance and economics, it’s often about how people react to the news and politics,” she observes. “That’s what really drives finance. I minored in psychology because I wanted to bridge those two concepts.”

What’s next for this ambitious young woman? Most likely, a return to the classroom for certification as a financial advisor or maybe a master’s degree. “One of my good friends is graduating next semester from the MBA program,” she adds. “I’d definitely come back to Zicklin.”  

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