Autobiography - Arielle Montgomery - 2024

Success takes planning. I learned this from a young age and the principles have propelled me in all of my life and career goals.

I was nine years old when I started planning my future at Stanford. It wasn’t for the obvious reasons. I believed that if I could earn a spot at my dream school, my father would be proud of me. The extent to which a child will go to get a parent’s approval is incredible.

But the unimaginable happened and we moved from suburban California to rural Texas the summer before I started high school. I was mentally sharp but emotionally spent by changing schools. The adjustment was rough, but we had to make lemonade.

I went from going to one of the best middle schools in California to one of the worst public high schools in Texas but I was able to get into my dream school because I utilized all of my limited resources to the fullest extent – it was achieved by implementing a robust studying and testing strategy that started day one of eighth grade. My teachers became my allies and I sought out mentors to form my village of supporters. No one else from my high school has attended Stanford since but I will always be grateful for my opportunities and I pay it forward by mentoring young students all over the world in their admissions journey.

During my time at Stanford, I was able to achieve all of my goals and finished with an Engineering degree and lifelong friends that have exposed me to concepts and ideas that I never thought possible. The beauty of attending a world class institution is that the full spectrum of the human experience is present on that campus – from extraordinary privilege to refugees of war and everything in between. I learned more from my classmates than I did in the classroom and that’s invaluable. I was chosen to work at cultural centers on campus to get leadership exposure and eventually was appointed to sit on the Board of Trustees as a voting student member on the Alumni and External Relations Committee. I was privileged to get exposed at a young age to the inner workings of how Board decisions are made and the dynamics. This skill helped me in innumerable ways. Studying abroad in Japan, however, was the true game changer but I didn’t know it at the time.

I started working with Admissions in 2005 in their yield activities to attract admitted students to campus. My job was to rally and coordinate all the host recruitment of 100 dorm leaders and 1500 room hosts for the prospective freshmen. I was then retained as a consultant for future Admit Weekends and during my senior year, I became a Diversity Recruitment Intern at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions and flew around the US to represent Stanford Admissions. The stories I heard and the students I impacted fueled my interest in making admissions part of my life purpose when the time was right. That time is now.

Opportunities were endless at Stanford. The hardest thing was that you didn’t know where to start and FOMO (fear of missing out). I regrettably didn’t sleep as much as I should have in the first year. Coming from a small town in Texas, I was not aware of careers outside of law and medicine and academia but I learned about consulting and banking early on. I first sought out to do a consulting internship in my sophomore year to get a sense and build some skills for a baking internship following my junior year. I had to build another village to make these goals a reality so I applied and received several fellowships to nurture my skills in finance and business outside of my engineering studies. The end result was impressive and I received more than 7 offers for investment banking internships my junior year. I chose to join the now defunct Lehman Brothers because of the culture.

TLDR: Before graduation in 2008, I had secured my first job on Wall Street in investment banking M&A in New York and I survived the collapse of my firm, Lehman Brothers, to stay on staff at Barclays Capital. Resilience is my middle name.

Resilience is what attracted me to learn more about Japan and study abroad there. I was attracted to the fact that they could rebuild and forgive atrocities committed during war. The language was fascinating and the way of life pre-Google Translate was something I wanted to experience. I wanted to get lost and feel helpless because life had gone so well for me up until that point. Breaking out of my comfort zone was the most transformational experience I ever had. My heart still lives in Japan and I have an ongoing deep relationship with the country that will always propel me to visit her shores every year.

But this resilience did not come easy. I often counsel stressed out students in the admissions process or my students that are already enrolled at their dream school. The amount of stress and pressure is almost unbearable these days and most students aren’t ready for this when all they were worrying about was the acceptance letter and not graduating from university intact rather than in pieces from the stress of it. With nearly 20 years of experience being a mentor and counseling humans, I am a persistent problem solver that is always available to put things in context for my students and redirect the negative energy into something more productive.

I interact with students regularly on behalf of Stanford as the leading interviewer worldwide. I did not believe that interviewing was a necessary step for Stanford to take to attract the right students but rather than protest, I wanted to make the process more transparent, fair and stress students out less. I did not intend to get recognized by the university for my work but I was inducted into the Stanford Associates in 2015. It’s the organization for the top 1% of Stanford volunteers that is an honor to be part of.

I also believe in philanthropy and fundraise for Stanford’s Fund for Undergraduate Education that funds financial aid. I have sponsored many scholarships and will continue to donate because I believe in giving back.

I made many pivots in my professional career before ending up in this field. I wanted to get exposure and develop a bulletproof skillset. With that, anything would be possible. After my first role in investment banking, I was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. It took a year to stabilize and it truly was one of the best things that happened to me in retrospect because I understood the fragility and gift of life and one’s healthspan. I also had to learn how to surrender and let go of things that were not in my direct control – stoicism in practice at 23 years old. After getting a clean bill of health, I chose to go after a different path altogether and work in the fashion industry at Gap Inc’s Old Navy HQ in San Francisco. Working in the retail business was not challenging enough for me though so I returned to Wall Street but this time on the capital markets side initially researching alternative energy stocks and then retail stocks. I worked 18 hours a day seven days a week once again but commuted from SF to NY six days a week.

It was intense but the learning experience from the #1 ranked analyst on Wall Street was invaluable. My engineering background helped me become an expert on retail technology at the time that gave our team a competitive edge. The access we had to CEOs and investors was unparalleled and learning the questions they ask and how they approach their decision making is something that stayed with me. There were some questionable acts that I witnessed that necessitated my departure from the industry and I moved on to big oil and worked there for ten years in various capacities including at a refinery and then in Singapore and Brunei as a Board advisor for our LNG plant in Southeast Asia. Being able to understand all of the dynamics that drive our society and economy was yet again invaluable but again, I observed things that aren’t aligned with my personal code of ethics so I needed to leave the business.

One of the benefits of going from having no time to lots of vacation time at the energy company was that I developed the travel bug. I went to 35 countries during those ten years but I kept going to the same places over and over like Japan 20 times, Denmark 40 times, and Greenland 7 times. A classmate inspired me to go to Greenland with his film “Chasing Ice” and going to Greenland for the first time in 2016 was transformational. Greenland feels like another planet and the way of life there is unlike anything I’ve experienced. I’m at the mercy of the weather, the limited resources in a very remote part of the world, the ingenious inventions of the indigenous (we say Kalaallit for West Greenlanders or Tunumiit for East Greenlanders instead of “Inuit”) people to survive, the vast amounts of unspoiled nature, and the fascinating history.

I love photography and I have won some awards but my favorite subject is the ice in Greenland. Like snowflakes, icebergs are unique because the way they are born by breaking off a glacier. The big ones are so beautiful to witness that my photographs cannot capture the essence. There are expressive, interpretative, sculptural forms but others are absolutely abstract. Every single one, without exception, is an ephemeral design that inevitably disappears, never to be seen again.

The ice and the experience of the indigenous people spoke to me in a manner that I never experienced in all my travels. Something with Greenland had to be my purpose on this planet. I kept exploring every corner of the country and I now have a travel business that takes me there frequently. I get asked to join luxury expedition ships as a guest lecturer on Greenland’s culture. It’s a dream come true.

Immersion changed things for me as a human. I believe that understanding places like Greenland and/or remote and subsistence lifestyles can help you reframe how you see the world and approach problem solving. It could quite possibly alter the course of a young person’s life if exposed young enough. Between the cancer diagnosis at a young age, witnessing unrelenting, incessant greed in my career, living in Denmark and Singapore, going to Japan to learn for the sake of it and then becoming enamored with Greenland -  everything was worth it because I had arrived at where I was supposed be all along… in the wild wilderness.

My career also fueled my interest in understanding the drivers of climate change and what can realistically be done about it. Net Zero by 2050 sounds great but it’s not the answer because the accountability is not there. Decarbonizing technologies are available and have been for a long time but are deliberately underutilized.

We find things to divide ourselves – be it race, religion, politics, nationality, or what have you – but he indigenous Kalaallit people taught me that we are all interconnected and interrelated to everything. For instance, our sweat ->  clouds -> precipitation / snow that lands on the glaciers and calves off to form the icebergs. The ice is out ancestor. They showed me how to understand nature and appreciate the rare opportunity to stand in front of it to feel the awe and overwhelming scale that you can only experience in person in the polar regions. With this, I became indebted to these people and climate change became personal for me.

Even though the climate crisis is a largely systemic issue, you still have the power to make a difference. The choices we make today have the ability to make a positive difference for years to come. Get involved and make it personal.

My success took planning but it also took time, patience, and a bit of serendipity. I had to be brave enough to explore my interests, invest the time and funds, dive deep and find my niche. I had to make sacrifices in high school, college, and my first couple of jobs to set myself up. It was worth it and the story keeps developing.