CBS Post would like to congratulate Srishti Bhandari, a penultimate year student pursuing Bachelor of Management Studies, for finishing in the third position at the EY Corporate Finance Woman of the Year Global Competition (2020).

After being one of the winners in the global contest, held in Rome from the 9th – 11th of February 2020, Srishti will now commence a year-long mentorship program by a female senior partner at EY as a reward for her podium finish at the competition. In this month’s edition, Srishti describes her journey throughout the competition.

Never did I think that something that started out as an innocuous email promotion, that I happened to have clicked on because I was troubled by my abject boredom, would culminate into a journey so riveting, that it’d certainly become one of the defining moments of my life.

This 3-month journey, competing in and subsequently winning, first, the regional round of the EY Corporate Finance Woman of the Year contest, taught me a lot about myself.

For starters, it instilled in me a renewed sense of confidence and tunnel-visioned focus to tackle even problems that seem too intricate to attempt; furthermore, it taught me the need to leverage others’ strengths to work and succeed as part of dynamic teams and most importantly it instilled in me a sensibility that there is a conspicuous need for more and more women to become stakeholders and solicit roles in the finance industry — for it needs the sensitivity and meticulousness that comes easy to most women. 

Competing and collaborating with 21 other women, representing different countries from all across the globe, at the international finals in Rome, truly made me savour the taste of corporate life and grounded the reality of what it means to be a global citizen. A few months back, had someone asked me to define the term ‘corporate finance’ for them, I’d quiver at the thought of not knowing the correct definition, but this experience made me realize that its understanding is individualistic and access ought to be ubiquitous, to encourage more and more stakeholders to carve a niche for themselves in the world of finance and make global teams more and more diverse. The podium finish was just the icing on the cake and I’m truly grateful to EY for this nascent exposure to corporate life.