Episode summary
Cynthia Plouché discusses career uncertainty, leadership, belonging and purpose.
Key takeaways
- Mentorship can appear in unexpected ways.
- Relationships and less visible opportunities can contribute to a career.
- The conversation explores belonging alongside technical skills.
About this episode
What does it really take to build a meaningful career when you don’t have it all figured out?
In this conversation, Cynthia Plouché, Founder & CEO of The Alzenia Project, joins Ashley Leftwich, CEO of Rock The Street, Wall Street, for an honest discussion about navigating career uncertainty, leadership, and purpose. Cynthia shares her journey from being one of fewer than 40 Black women in her Radcliffe class to leading multi-billion-dollar investment portfolios and serving on corporate boards.
Together, Cynthia and Ashley explore what belonging really means, how mentorship often shows up in unexpected ways, and why taking on unglamorous opportunities and building relationships can matter just as much as technical skills.
Designed with students and early-career professionals in mind, this interview offers practical insight into finding your voice, embracing uncertainty, and building a career rooted in purpose and impact.
Key themes:
* Belonging and identity
* Mentorship that happens organically
* Career growth through unexpected opportunities
* Leadership without having a perfect plan
Whether you’re exploring your path or rethinking your next step, this conversation offers perspective, reassurance, and practical wisdom.
Listen to the episode
Transcript
Transcript supplied by Riverside; it may contain transcription errors.
speaker-0: Welcome to Rocking Finance, the Rock the Street Wall Street podcast. Real stories, real access, real passion to finance. Join us for candid, high impact conversations with industry leaders sharing the insights, experiences, career pivots and journeys that can help young women advance through the financial industry with great confidence. Today, I'm your host, Ashley Leftwich, CEO of Rock the Street Wall Street. Now let's rock finance. Cynthia, it is great to speak with you today and you have such an inspiring story. We're excited to share it with our students, so we'll go ahead and jump right in. You are part of a remarkable cohort at Radcliffe and Harvard, and you were a part of it during very formative years that were a moment in history. So can you walk us through your educational journey and what your experience, what that experience meant to you as you decided to pursue that path?
speaker-1: Happy to, it's a pleasure to be here and to be talking to you today. Leading up to my entering Harvard Radcliffe were many personal moments. And as you said, my college years and the years before that really were formative for me personally, but also for the country. was a time where we were right on the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War. So lots is going on.
speaker-0: Can you share a bit with us about your family background?
speaker-1: To go back a little bit, and I think this gives you a sense of how I was as a student or as an adult. Beginning in junior high, I was bussed from my all-black neighborhood to an integrated neighborhood nearby. And going into high school, my family moved from Dallas to a small town in Iowa. And I give this background because I think it helps paint a picture of the period of time when I first began to be a first. or an only. And so that's basically from my junior high days onward. In high school, I was a joiner and band, student council, theater, and eventually I led student council as student body president and obviously kept my grades up. And looking back on that time, I will say that's when I first really embraced what I now talk about as join, learn, lead approach to life where You join something, you learn about it, and then if you choose, you try to step up and lead it. And for me, I think this approach was born out of a need to belong, which I don't think is unusual for a teenager. So I joined things that I enjoyed and the people who I liked and who liked me, and I felt included and very comfortable. There were challenging moments during those years, but I preferred, as in my life, to dwell on the positive. And it was at the encouragement of my high school counselor that I even applied to Radcliffe, which was still separate admission for Radcliffe. They were soon to be joined with Harvard. But the only thing I knew about Radcliffe was I had seen the movie when I was like 13 about love story. And so I thought, oh, that sounds like it would romanticize being in this university. So I applied, got in, and I would say I was so happy to put in a word socially because I was in a place where there were so many more people who looked like me. And even though in my class, there were only you less than 40 black women out of a class of 1600 people. So it's small numbers, but meaningful. out of that time comes this bonding with the group of women who to this day, there are six or seven of them who were still very close and very tight. And that, you know, of the 40 some of who have passed, I feel like I could call on them at any time and they would still, you know, take the call be be there for me to have the discussion or whatever. know, years later, and I say this with my Elsenia project, know, sisterhood is power and it was then, but maybe it's that sisterhood is empowerment because that's what I got and am getting from these women still today. I think it's important to note and ask me if you have any questions, but academically, I wasn't sure what I wanted to major in. I wish I had sought out more guidance when I was on campus, because I hadn't come prepared for the, I would say the academic choices and the competitiveness of this university. And many of my friends came in knowing they were pre-law, pre-med, or something very specific. And that wasn't me. many of them had gone through summer prep programs and prep schools. And so I ended up being a psychology major because I like the subject. thought it was also flexible and I can keep my options open. And so that's what I did. I majored in psychology. And as I was thinking about this part of my story, I would say if there's one thing I would have changed, would be something that I had no control over really was been to live in dorms where most of the freshmen live. Cause in my freshman year we lived off in the Radcliffe dorms because things were still getting figured out. And so by living in the Radcliffe dorms, which were away from the central yard, I felt I would have known more classmates if I had done that. And frankly, it probably would have been a more diverse experience for me. But nowadays, all the freshmen live in the yard their first year. I see the school is obviously paying attention to how to best help. students fit in. So then the last piece is after college, I went to, I worked for two years. I worked for what was called then the New England Telephone Company. was in a sales administrative role. And I think again, here's my, you know, I come from a family where we were postmen, we were teachers, we were, you know, things that this world of business and was just not on my radar. And I will say that my first impression was thinking of business things as capitalists, not for this human good kind of approach. But I ultimately decided to go to business school and went to Wharton for my two years there.
speaker-0: It's an incredible journey and so many things don't surprise me. I've known you, you being student body president, that doesn't surprise me. And you're right, it really does lean into your motto that you've shared with me before as far as joining, learning, and then leading and how those all can facilitate into one. And I absolutely love that sisterhood is empowerment. I mean, I think that that We talk a lot about how it's important for us to see other people that look like us and how important it is for us to imagine ourselves in different spaces. And I think that you absolutely hit something that many of our students are going to say, which is that academically, it's hard to ask. It's hard to ask for guidance. And sometimes it seems like everybody else already knows exactly what they want to play.
speaker-1: Yes, yes.
speaker-0: And having that relationship with those other women really is something that sounds like it made a difference to you, especially with you all still being connected so closely. And it can for our students as well. So I think that that's a really important point that you mentioned, because there's so much within that. interesting that you majored in psychology, because I feel like psychology has so much to do with buying decisions with the economy and probably gave you great background for going to Wharton Business School, which kind of brings us to the next piece that I wanted to talk to you about, which was your career journey. So you have had such focus and intention driving your professional life. What were a few key moments of success and maybe even a few lessons that you'd like to share?
speaker-1: Yeah, and I think it's very true that my focus and, you know, intention was very strong. But I will also say that I really enjoyed what I did and I enjoyed the people I worked with. And so to me, that was a driver for my career. Being able to work with a group of people who were smart, had, but had a sense of humor and good personalities along the way and in my work. life, you know, it incorporated taking some risk and being out of my comfort zone along the way, but no regrets. that's my so my first job, which was a rotation program, a management training program. So I spent the first 18 months going to three different departments, and one of which was an investment, the investment management group at this insurance company. Once I finished that program, they invited me to join the investment management group and as assistant portfolio manager. And so that really kicked off my career. And over the course of being at Equitable Capital, which was about six years, I started as an assistant portfolio manager and then I rose to managing director responsible for a little over a couple of billion dollars of fixed income assets in portfolios. Primarily in mortgage backed securities, which is, you know, don't worry about the name. But what was interesting about it is mortgage backed securities were a relatively new asset class. And so two things stick out for me. One is because I had this very tedious Excel based project that related to mortgage backed securities and figuring out what we owned and such. but that ended up setting the path for my progression because I took a hard assignment. It wasn't glamorous. was what you know, served me well and it served my manager well. And so lesson one was don't hesitate to take any project that you know, is offered as long as it you know, seems practical. But I generally I think I just recommend taking projects that may seem you know, maybe below you but this is how you learn and this is for me, working was all about growth.
speaker-0: ⁓ interesting. Did you ever have a mentor along the way?
speaker-1: I had a manager who I worked well with and ultimately he became what I wouldn't have called it then a mentor, but he was my mentor. And we worked together in a way that it was almost an apprenticeship in terms of me learning to be a good portfolio manager. And I would say another thing that strikes me is about when you… ⁓ I had a great relationship with the trading desk, the people who were actually executing the trades at portfolio managers tell you about, and a wall street coverage. And my, I think my strength was my ability to take my analytical skills and put my people skills together with it. And that has served me well. And I also had a sense of humor. So, you know, definitely it was a guy's world, but I figured out my way. to just smack dab, put myself in the middle of it, not compromising myself, but having a great time doing it. And I think, you know, this is a skill, this marrying of analytical, the analytical and the people skills is something that I've been honing since middle school. Cause remember, we're thinking back to integrating a school and think back to living in a small town in Iowa. I just, you know, the last thing I would say is that This mentor, his name is Brian, became very critically important because several years later after we had stopped working together, he was the person who recommended me for my first corporate board.
speaker-0: wonderful. And I mean, it brings up a good point that not all mentors doesn't have to be an official ask to be there. Right. And, and still, you know, you lead into other pieces. think
speaker-1: think those relationships, they kind of organically evolve. mean, you can ask specifically, but you can also nurture one without the specific ask, because I did not.
speaker-0: And I absolutely love the lesson learned of don't hesitate to take on projects. Sometimes I couldn't imagine what it was like to step in and then be over a couple million dollars and new asset classes and all these other pieces. And then also look at, okay, I'm going to take on this project because it's something that's going to set me apart and I'm going to learn something new. And I think that that's just incredible. This brings us to an exciting chapter with the Alzenia Project named in honor of your remarkable grandmother. Rock the Street, Brawl Street is proud to be a grantee and grateful for our work together. From co-hosting events like this one, all the way to supporting our Chicago students and alum together. What a great vision. Can you tell us more about it?
speaker-1: You know, as you said, it was named in honor of my grandmother and Elzenia project, think reflects her value of community commitment and to positively impacting the lives, especially of young children, because that was her area of specialization. She absolutely believed in the power of education as I do. And I love sharing that my grandmother, Elzenia, my mother, Patricia, and I all graduated college within 15 years of each other. because my grandmother graduated at the age of 47, 48. And so she went back to school to get her education. So that's a very anchoring part of my life. And I would say the vision for Elzinga Project is to continue that legacy by supporting people, spaces, organizations that were belonging, thrives, and connection is viewed as an asset. Partnering with organizations like Rock the Street, Wall Street is very special to me because I do believe in the power of financial literacy, investment expertise for everyone at all states, at all points of your life, right? And it's something that we can't, I think, talk enough about, especially for young women. And, you know, as I was thinking about our conversation, One of the things that struck me because I really just hadn't focused on it was that, you know, in my career and now even in my boards, I was used to dealing with billions of dollars. mean, you know, large, large sums, I, with the Alzenia project, I've been powerfully reminded of the difference that a small contribution can make, a conversation with someone can do. or spending time with people who are in a different generation than you are, all of these things can really make a difference. And so that is where I get my energy for the Alzenia Project, that, know, and then obviously the memory of my grandmother. But yeah, so I think we work on partnering, we support leadership, we wanna make a difference in people's lives. And I'm very proud of what
speaker-0: We're doing you certainly are making a difference in people's lives without question. And one of the themes that has come up during this conversation, I mean, all the way from the sisterhood to the Alzenia project, is that belonging? What does belonging mean to you?
speaker-1: ⁓ you know, it's so vital and integral to who I am. And I think it's because of my life path where standing out, it was a challenging thing for me. And I just wanted to always to be a part of wherever I was, be present in the moment and be a part of it. And I think that, you know, it takes energy and effort to do that. but it's so rewarding. And that's what I want to give to other people is that sense of belonging is very, pretty straightforward in my mind. I think that we, know, how our families are built, how our schools are built, how just all organizations and institutions can really help provide and support belonging in a time, particularly for people, young people when they're in that. teenage to early adulthood range when you're just looking for a touchstone. So, yeah, I'm not being very eloquent about it, but it is what that drives me.
speaker-0: It's been an honor to have the conversation with you today, and I'm so delighted about the takeaways, your lessons learned that you shared and really your journey overall. I think it's something that not only inspires me, but will inspire many of our students. So thank you.
speaker-1: You're very welcome and I hope it is inspirational. think a lot of people will be like me. You just feel like you're just doing one step at a time and you're just living your life. But know that, you know, it matters what you do and it matters that you show up for other people and organizations and for yourself. So thank you for having me.
speaker-0: Absolutely. And to quote you, keep joining, keep learning and keep leading. Thank you for joining the conversation. Visit rockthestorywallstreet.com to learn more. Make sure to follow and join us for the next episode. Until next time, let's keep rocking finance.
