This fall, Business Insider announced its 2025 class of Rising Stars of Wall Street.
Seven stood out for pursuing unique paths, including sports, science, and field research.
They used those early experiences to rise inside firms like JPMorgan, Goldman, and Moelis.
Most people imagine Wall Street careers beginning in familiar ways: internships at major banks, economics coursework, and early exposure to markets. But some of the young professionals on Business Insider's 2025 Rising Stars of Wall Street list started out somewhere entirely different, long before entering finance.
One hoped to be a professional football player. Another was a collegiate golf champion with a goal of playing on all seven continents. A third conducted anthropology fieldwork in Sierra Leone. And another began in a chemistry lab before deciding research wasn't the right fit.
We're looking back at this year's cohort, focusing on those whose formative professional years were spent far from trading floors and deal teams. Today, this group has gone on to find success across a spectrum of industry niches from investment banking and private equity to hedge funds and quantitative investing.
Below, we're showcasing seven Rising Stars who switched careers, and how those beginnings helped steer their professional climb at firms like BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and more. Their backgrounds are organized alphabetically by their last name.
The sports lifer underwriting NBA dealsLamar Cardinez, Blue Owl
Courtesy Blue Owl
Lamar Cardinez, Blue Owl
Before he ever worked in finance, Cardinez thought he'd play professional football. When that didn't happen, he found a way to remain close to the action — interning at Madison Square Garden, joining the 2014 Super Bowl host committee, and completing the NFL's rotational program across media, business development, and strategy.
He thought he'd stay there and ascend the ranks. But he decided on a different path that seemed to align more with his interests: finance.
After earning his MBA and working in investment banking, he joined Blue Owl's HomeCourt Partners, a fund established with the NBA to buy minority stakes in teams.
Cardinez has since worked on multiple franchise deals, including the Phoenix Suns' $4 billion sale and a 2024 transaction involving the Minnesota Timberwolves.
The Oxford anthropology researcher turned C-suite gatekeeperCatherine Kress is the chief of staff to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
Courtesy of BlackRock
Catherine Kress, BlackRock
Kress' path to high finance began in academic research, studying anthropology and psychology at Notre Dame and conducting fieldwork in Sierra Leone before pursuing graduate work on Angola's energy sector at the University of Oxford. She later worked at political research and consultancy firm, Eurasia Group, training investors to integrate geopolitical risk into decision-making.
Kress came to BlackRock first as an advisor to Tom Donilon, the former US national security advisor, a post she called a "dream job." She helped Donilon elevate the firm's geopolitics function into a permanent part of the BlackRock Investment Institute.
But she didn't stop there. This year, Kress was named the chief of staff to Larry Fink, the firm's powerful CEO. She told Business Insider that this new job was the "culmination" of her career, offering "unparalleled exposure" to global policymakers and business leaders.
The oil-rig engineer with a global upbringingJack Levendoski, an executive director at JPMorgan Chase.
Courtesy of JPMorgan Chase
Jack Levendoski, JPMorgan Chase
Levendoski grew up all over the world — from Louisiana to London, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Australia — before beginning his career as a facilities engineering project manager at Chevron.
In that role, he supported offshore oil and gas work in the Gulf of Mexico. Levendoski later moved into investment banking and is now an executive director in JPMorgan's M&A group, advising on high-profile technology and software transactions.
The ex-Cambridge chemist leading creative private-market dealsJosef Menasche, Goldman Sachs
Courtesy of Goldman Sachs
Josef Menasche, Goldman Sachs
Menasche admits he didn't always feel like a natural fit for the finance industry — he didn't grow up in a household of bankers, he said, and he studied chemistry and math at Cambridge. But after trying academic research, he found the lab's pace too slow. That realization led him to roles that blended analytical work with more day-to-day momentum, eventually steering him into secondaries.
Today, Menasche is a managing director and global cohead of Goldman Sachs' private capital and liquidity solutions group, working across real estate, infrastructure, private equity, and venture capital transactions.
The engineering grad on the front lines of data center M&AAman Mittal of Moelis
Courtesy of Moelis
Aman Mittal, Moelis
Mittal began his career studying electronics and communications engineering in India before joining Bain & Company as an analyst in its technology, media, and telecom practice. He later moved into digital-infrastructure advisory work and, at Moelis, has worked on more than 15 data-center-related transactions totaling more than $25 billion in value.
His recent mandates include Apollo's acquisition of Stream Data Centers. And he helped Prime Data Centers, another platform in the space, arrange the sale of an undisclosed ownership stake to the institutional investors Snowhawk and Nuveen.
The ex-undergrad math teacher and Apple intern turned hedge-fund macro mindNikunj Jain, Bridgewater Associates
Courtesy of Bridgewater Associates
Nikunj Jain, Bridgewater
Jain studied machine learning, taught undergraduate math, interned at Apple in machine learning engineering, and worked for the Department of Defense before joining Bridgewater, where he's now head of Asia research. After graduating from UC Berkeley in two and a half years, he pursued quantitative finance after a friend suggested it.
He said he found the Bay Area "a little slower than I would have liked" — a description he's shaken off by running a 15- to 20-person team synthesizing regional activity into trading signals at the giant hedge fund.
The D1 golf star who now works on multibillion-dollar corporate breakupsJackie Shepherd, Morgan Stanley
Courtesy of Morgan Stanley
Jackie Shepherd, Morgan Stanley
Before joining the ranks of Wall Street, Shepherd spent years competing in Division I golf, earning a full-ride scholarship and captaining the University of Minnesota's team. She began her career in accounting at EY's international tax practice, where she first encountered investment banking.
"I didn't realize that there was an intersection between the two," she told Business Insider. "I wanted to be the person coming up with more of the cool ideas." So she made the pivot to Wall Street.
After holding roles at Goldman Sachs and Citi, she joined Morgan Stanley's separations and structured solutions group. Shepherd has worked on roughly $250 billion in transactions, including Comcast's pending carve-out of its cable networks.
Golf, she said, remains a key part of her life, adding that aspires to play on all seven continents.