Fourth-year Colin Herbert came to UVA already knowing he wanted to major in Commerce and start his career in business. What he didn’t expect was how much the people around him would shape what those things would actually mean to him.
He grew up immersed in that world. Raised in Westwood, MA, Colin absorbed the rhythms of business through dinner table conversations with his father, uncles, aunts, and grandfather, all of whom were part of the family’s regional restaurant equipment company. Deals, sales, and strategy were recurring topics at family gatherings, and he listened closely. “I was always trying to understand what they were working on and get a sense of what they did,” he says. “That was really ingrained in me when I was a kid.”
By senior year of high school, that curiosity had turned hands-on. A school project led to a brief apprenticeship at Arc70 Capital, where he got his first real look at finance in practice. The firm focused on funding affordable housing projects, which gave it a dimension he hadn’t anticipated. “It was really cool that my first finance experience was working on something with a very real-world, positive social impact,” he says. As the weeks in the office introduced him to the technical side of the work, they also showed him why that kind of work mattered.
When he arrived at UVA, Colin was confident about his direction. But confidence about a destination is different from knowing how to get there, and that gap closed largely because of the people he found at McIntire.
Joining the Global Markets Group put him in regular contact with third- and fourth-years who had already navigated applying to Comm, recruiting, and landing internships. “There were so many older students doing exactly the types of things I wanted to do,” he says. “Just seeing what was possible gave me a sense of direction I didn’t have before.” In high school, he had been self-reliant to a fault. At McIntire, he learned what became available when he wasn’t doing everything on his own.
That same spirit carried into the classroom. A Finance concentration and an Economics double major gave him a foundation where theory and application reinforced each other. The overlap became especially clear in Econometrics, where his finance background helped anchor statistical concepts and the reverse proved equally true. “It’s very statistics heavy, so I was extremely grateful I had taken Quantitative Analytics before that as part of the Integrated Core coursework,” he says. “There was a ton of crossover.”
His internships tested that foundation in two very different settings. After his second year, Colin joined Consensus, a consumer- and retail-focused bank outside Boston, where being on the small team meant he was sitting in on client calls and working closely with senior leaders from the start. “It was really helpful for understanding how deals come together from start to finish,” he says. The following summer at Guggenheim Securities in New York brought a class of around 70 interns, a faster pace, and exposure to a far wider range of industries and transactions. The contrast was sharp, but his education prepared him well for the demands of the role.
By the time he returned to Grounds for his final year, he had enough of his own experience to start giving it away. He took on the role of Global Markets Group CEO and became a Teaching Assistant for Professors Ben McCartney and Gretchen Gamrat in the fall and Professor Robert Parham in the spring. In both roles, he spent much of his time helping students work through technical concepts, prepare for interviews, and navigate the same recruiting process he had recently completed. The mentorship that had once guided him became what he could offer others.
“There’s nothing quite like seeing someone you’ve worked with get an offer,” he says. “You’ve spent hours with them, and so watching them reach their goals is incredibly fulfilling.”
As graduation approaches, Colin is heading back to Guggenheim to begin his career in New York. He is bringing the technical skills he built across four years, along with something harder to teach: an understanding of what it means to be shaped by a community, and what it looks like to pass that forward.
