Heather Hado ’06: From Answering Phones to Assessing Risk at Morgan Stanley

Heather Hado ’06 always thought the stock market was intriguing and even as a child wanted to understand its inner workings. “I was a young female who wanted to stand on my own two feet one day, and I wanted to invest in it,” she says. While working “random” jobs to pay her bills, Hado enrolled in night classes at the Feliciano School of Business, where she gained more than an understanding of the stock market. “The school provided me a great opportunity to network because one of my classmates was working full time at Morgan Stanley,” says Hado.

Hado used that contact to land a receptionist job at Morgan Stanley and immediately began soaking up all the financial information she could. Nineteen years later, she’s a senior vice president and senior risk officer. “Just having that network in my class at Feliciano with a colleague to break into the industry, was key,” says Hado.

Over the years Hado has gained extensive operational knowledge and acquired the necessary industry licenses to excel in finance, which she attributes to her Feliciano education. While preparing for the Series 7 Exam, she wasn’t the least bit intimidated. “I’m actually really prepared to do this. I have a great education from Montclair. I learned about it. I knew how to study. This school has prepared me for this,” says Hado.

Feliciano provided a base on which Hado built a career. “Walking into Morgan Stanley, a world-class company, it didn’t feel foreign to me. You’re in class, you hear these concepts, you’re learning about finance, but you never think they’re going to come into play. When I actually walked into a professional workplace, I understood the lingo from the education I got at Feliciano,” says Hado.

Using the skills she acquired by observing her professors and from her personal mentors, Hado manages six risk officers at Morgan Stanley and mentors individuals in Montclair’s Accelerated MBA program. “The reason I came back to Montclair to give my time to some of the other students is after you work for a long time you realize what kind of education I got at Montclair. It was a phenomenal education,” she says.