Name: Erin Parker
Position: Outreach
Tell us about yourself: I’m a sophomore from the Philippines majoring in Economics and minoring in Mathematics. I’m currently the Co-President of the Blyth Fund and an analyst at Stanford Finance. My outside interests are medieval literature, cross country, and historical films.
Tell us something interesting about yourself: I once got stepped on by a cow in this Philippine village called Isabella. I survived!.
What motivated you to get involved in Gumball Capital? My childhood years in Isabella were idyllic in comparison to Philippine city life where many families crowd into metal shack slums built next to stagnant and polluted sewage outflows. This great disparity between wealth and poverty in my home country is my sole motivation for the promotion of microfinance.
As a young woman entering the finance industry, I believe in the creation of personal wealth for its redistribution to entrepreneurs whose businesses promote their locality’s economic development. Microfinance preserves specialization of labor while promoting the redistribution of wealth, a mutually beneficial arrangement allowing me to work in corporate finance while allowing my people to run their businesses in a way that both of us prosper.
What do you do at Gumball Capital? I work on the grant applications and grant competitions. My favorite one was the JP Morgan Goodventure Competition where we flew to New York and pitched to JPM for a chance to win $25k. I loved working on the financial statements for this project – I got to make a DCF model and quantify Gumball’s economic value. It was great combining my interests in finance and poverty alleviation!
Favorite part about working here? The culture. We don’t just come to meetings here, we come to meetings really excited to tell everybody what we’ve accomplished. We’re enthusiastic and we’re on it. That’s very different from what I’ve seen at other student groups. It’s inspiring and gets us all to keep going.
What’s your vision for the future of Gumball Capital? What would you like to see the group accomplish? I would like to see the Gumball Challenge expand to over 100 schools by the time I graduate. I also would like to see Gumball have more personal interaction with the entrepreneurs that we finance.
If you could trade places with anyone for a week, who would it be and why? Major Motoko Kusanagi from the fictional Japanese series called “Ghost in the Shell”. It would be awesome to have a super-poweful cyborg body and lead a high level intelligence team that gets to crack the bad guys with mad computer skills, mad machine guns, and absolute intellectual prowess. That’s my kind of fun.
If you could have any superpower, what would it be? Teleportation.
Who would win in a fight- a pirate or a ninja? Whoever prepared for it the hardest and with the most wholesome intentions. Say, if the pirate was preparing to just loot the ninja’s village and he prepared for it so-so with booze and some cruel intentions, whereas the ninja served to protect his hometown and trained from sunrise to sunset with the safety of his people in mind – I say the ninja is totally going to win.
