Undergraduate Spotlights

Connor Boyles

The Economics Department at SMU helped me develop a solid understanding of important economic subject matter and principles. As an undergraduate, I built on my critical thinking, writing, and analytical skills, which have helped me begin a career in financial services. Since graduating in 2016, I have held several roles in the corporate finance organization for Fidelity Investments. Our firm is based in Boston, Massachusetts, and has a large office in Westlake, Texas, only 30 minutes from SMU’s campus. We are challenged to find ways to leverage the firm’s scale to lower our costs and deliver more value to our customers.

In each of my roles, I have sourced, analyzed, and presented the economics of our business lines. I have primarily covered our retail brokerage business and its management team. Our work prepares senior management with valuable insights to drive decision-making. Early in my career, I focused on revenue and expenses. Lately, I have gotten very involved with the firm’s modernization initiatives such as building next-generation data lakes and real-time profitability measures.

Whether I am looking at profit and loss (P&L) statements on the job or listening to a financial markets podcast in the car, I am still learning and advancing the same subject matter and principles I developed as an undergraduate at SMU. The faculty in the Economics Department tested and prepared my class for success. I am forever thankful for the opportunity to attend SMU.

Alexis Jones

I made the absolute most of my time at SMU, and I believe my experiences helped shape who I am today and my career as an economist. While at SMU, I earned undergraduate degrees in both economics and statistics and was involved all around campus as a member of the SMU Mustang Band, the SMU Ballroom Dance Team, the University Honors Program, and served as a research coordinator for the SMU Social and Clinical Neuroscience Lab. After graduation, my education at SMU helped me secure a position as an economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics where I work directly on the production of consumer expenditure data, which is used to weight the CPI and is published in various reports and as public use microdata for researchers and students. This fall, I will begin a master's degree in data science from the University of Texas at Austin. Many thanks to SMU and the SMU Economics Department for helping me develop the skills that have enabled me to hit the ground running in my career.