Hi there! My name is Tao. I come from China, though I spent my primary school years growing up in the UK, so you could say that I am bilingual. I graduated with an Economics degree from Cambridge, and I am currently pursuing my passion for finance at London Business School, studying Masters in Financial Analysis. I hope you can get to know more about me from this website!
At Cambridge, I participated in a society called Bridges for Enterprise. We are a global student organisation advising start-up firms on raising finance. I was the Finance Advisor in the group.
We worked on many interesting projects. One was with a Microfinance firm in Kenya. Their mission was to provide lending to talented individuals who had no access to finance, or had no credit history, and to help them achieve their goals of starting businesses. As advisors, we helped them solve the problem of high default rates through more sophisticated ways of lending, and also helped them to raise capital through constructing a skeleton pitch deck. It was really rewarding to see our client transform.
This was a society where we would represent the management team of a particular business, and debate and negotiate with teams from other schools on various terms and contracts and press for the interest of our firm.
I was a leader in my team for various competitions. One of them was a discussion on the import of iron ore from Southeast Asia. We, as the receiver, have to negotiate as to how we inspect quality, the pricing of iron ores of different qualities, the payment method and the compensation schemes. This experience was really interesting as it allowed me to learn about a completely new industry, and to research how contracts in this industry works. Not only so, I’ve learnt to communicate efficiently, delegate and supervise tasks and also how to collaborate and play to each of our strengths.
I love playing badminton and pool with friends, and I also participated in the Cambridge Pool Competition. My intellectual curiosity has led me to self-studying Japanese as a third language, and I am currently studying the programming language R as well. I am also “self-employed” as a home bartender, and I sometimes try to think outside the box and explore my own cocktail recipes (definitely not a drinker I promise, but a rather interesting field of knowledge I like to explore in my own time).