LL Spring05.indd - Lehman College

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When Myrna Rivera left Puerto Rico at
21 to pursue her master’s degree at
Lehman College, she could not have guessed
how the experience would permanently change
her life. Now the founder and CEO of one of
the first Hispanic investment consulting firms
in the United States and the first Hispanic
woman to be elected to “Who’s Who of Investment
Management Consulting,” Rivera says her
years at Lehman played a crucial role in preparing
her for the success she has since achieved.
Rivera’s parents were not thrilled when
their 21-year-old daughter announced out of
the blue that she was going to New York City
on her own for graduate school. The family
had moved with their four children from New
York City to Puerto Rico for a better quality
of life when she was 14. And Rivera had truly
flourished in her new home, becoming fully
bilingual, getting straight A’s in high school and
graduating magna cum laude from the University
of Puerto Rico in three short years with a
bachelor’s degree in mathematics.
After graduating, she
thought she had her career
plans all worked out. “I
walked into the president’s
office and said I was interested
in working there,”
says Rivera, who had been
a professor’s assistant in the
University's Math Depart-
dreams.’
ment. Instead, she was
advised to start by getting a
graduate degree.
Through the Math Department, Rivera
learned about a new exchange program between
CUNY and the University of Puerto
Rico. The Puerto Rican Legislature secured a
small scholarship for her to attend Lehman
College in 1973, and she entered Lehman as
a graduate student of mathematics, teaching
as an adjunct by day and attending classes at
night.
“The campus was beautiful and really
conducive to academic work and social interaction,”
she says. “It was also a time of tremendous
cultural awakening, personally and for the
community in general.”
Taking advantage of the social and academic
climate, Rivera was able to explore multiple
interests. She founded a theater group called
Guasabara and expressed her love of music by
playing her guitar at student events. Having
14
Myrna Rivera ‘74 : At the Top of the Investment Management World,
She Believes that Lehman Prepared Her to Succeed
‘The diversity I learned
at Lehman helped me
not to put limits on my
Myrna Rivera as a graduate student at Lehman in 1974 and today,
as the founder and CEO of one of the first Hispanic investment
consulting firms in the United States.
studied classical music as an undergraduate,
she found music to be a good counterbalance
to the discipline of mathematics. She also explored
the city with a diverse group of friends.
“My experience at Lehman afforded me an
opportunity to have a more rounded experience,”
Rivera says, adding that what she learned
at Lehman also enabled
her to be well rounded in
the corporate world. “I was
allowed to blossom. I was
allowed to think. I was allowed
to speak out. That’s
vital when you’re in your
twenties.” Not wasting any
time after graduating from
the master’s program—once
more magna cum laude—Rivera
set her sights again on
teaching and expressed her interest in being
made a full-time professor in Lehman's Math
Department. But CUNY was in the midst of a
hiring freeze at the time so she had to rethink
her options. “I had fallen in love, I was engaged.
I figured I’m going to be here a while so I’d better
get myself a job,” Rivera jokes.
Not long afterwards, she met two of the first
Hispanic women to graduate from Harvard
Business School, who advised her to start
shaping a corporate career. Then she landed
a position working as a marketing specialist
and training coordinator for the Control Data
Corporation in New York in 1976.
Rivera admits that this particular time,
when companies were seeking to diversify their
staff, helped her get her foot in the door—but
she also never stopped striving to shape her
own individual career. In 1981, she joined Mer-
rill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith in
Puerto Rico as a retail account executive.
By 1983, Rivera no longer felt
inspired working as a broker and was
looking for a new direction to take
her career in. She discovered asset
management and consulting, which
turned out to be a more creative process
for her. “The diversity I learned at
Lehman helped me not to put limits
on my dreams,” she says.
A former Senior Vice President
and Consulting Group Director at
Salomon Smith Barney, Rivera left
her 17-year career in 1999 to open
her own management consulting firm, Consultiva
Internacional, Inc., which enables her to
provide investment management consulting to
individuals and institutions in Puerto Rico and
New York.
With some 40 million Latinos in the U.S.
alone, she felt this was a great niche market for
her. “I fell in love with the opportunity to empower
and help shape the destiny of organizations
and families,” says Rivera. “Creating and
managing wealth is a very sexy endeavor.”
Consultiva, which now has 20 employees,
has just been hired by the Los Angeles County
Employees Retirement System (LACERS).
Consultiva will help LACERS gain an understanding
of the emerging minority brokerage
landscape.
A Certified Investment Management
Analyst, Rivera is a member of the Investment
Management Consultants Association and a
director of the National Association of Securities
Professionals. Never straying too far from
her love of music, she is also a director of New
York City’s Música de Cámara, an organization
founded by Puerto Rican soprano Eva de la O.
Música de Cámara supports Puerto Rican and
other Latino classical musicians by presenting
them in concert venues throughout the city.
She fondly remembers her time at Lehman
as one that shaped her leadership skills. “Lehman
was one of those experiences that taught
me to be fearless,” says Rivera, who still has her
Lehman math books and the first paycheck stub
she received as an adjunct.
“It was an opportunity to be a mathematician,
an artist, an activist. Being thrown into
that environment helped to shape a very independent
character.” ◆