Every weekend last summer, after logging 80-hour weeks at a $50 billion private equity firm, Tatum Galvin caught 6 a.m. flights to play soccer matches across Florida. Then she flew back, got some sleep, and showed up to her desk on Monday.
Her peers thought she was setting herself up for failure. “Everyone who heard me pitch the idea said, ‘You’re not going to do that,’” she recalls. “‘After working 80-hour weeks, you’re going to fly to play a game? That’s just not happening.’“
She did it anyway. And by the end of the summer, she had her answer: Both paths were real, and she could hold them at the same time.
Tatum is set to graduate from McIntire and is staying on Grounds and completing a certificate as she plays one final season with UVA Women’s Soccer, focusing on winning a national championship and preparing for the trial-based process of turning pro in leagues like the NWSL and USL Super League. Finance runs alongside it, not behind it. She completed her internship at I Squared Capital and is now working with Parere Advisory, where Founder Janet Arzt (McIntire ’07) has been a direct and instructive guide into the advisory side of the industry.
The internship was intense and collaborative, echoing the structure of her Comm courses. Tatum arrived with something that stood out. “I felt like it was second nature to want to be the best,” she says. That competitive drive, built through years of high-level soccer, followed her directly into the office and sharpened her focus there.
With no weekday practices available, she designed her own training regimen and held herself to it without exception. Early-morning runs. Sprint work. Long-distance conditioning. Her weekly mileage hovered around 40 miles. Sleep averaged about four and a half hours a night. The physical demands were considerable, but the structure gave her something she valued more than rest: control.
“I’m big on controlling the controllables,” she explains. “If I didn’t run and showed up unfit, that would directly impact my performance and role within the team. There was no room in my head for negative thoughts.”
She never missed a morning workout, and the consistency built on itself. “Every morning at 7 a.m., I was running,” she says. “Proving that to myself gave me so much more confidence in my job and in soccer. I’d already done the hardest part of my day.” The rigor she brought to her fitness fed directly into her professional performance. Athlete and analyst, reinforcing each other.
“You get a lot of confidence out of proving to yourself every day that you can do something hard,” she says.
That long view is central to how Tatum thinks about what comes next. “I just want to play professionally,” she says. “I’m willing to work as hard as that means to make it happen.” And if the professional soccer path takes longer than expected, she is not concerned. “I know that if things don’t work out, I’m going to be okay. I’ve proven to myself I can succeed in finance too.”
One relentless summer in Miami didn’t just prove she could survive the dual pursuit. It showed her exactly how to build it, one early morning at a time.
