Please update your browser.by Chris Rice
3 min read
The Career Stops series chronicles the twists and turns that members of the Chase team take on the journey to their current roles with the firm. This week, we’re following Chris Rice, Product Owner in Personalization and Customer Insights, who took a circuitous route to finding his dream job with Chase. After graduating with an English degree and asking himself, “Now what can I do with this?” he pursued his computer hobby down a non-traditional path that led him to a Master's program at NYU and a career on Wall Street.
I graduated from the University of North Carolina (UNC) in 1996 with a degree in English and little direction for the rest of my life. My plan was to get an English degree then go to law school, but I decided along the way that I didn’t really want to be a lawyer. My hobby with computers ended up being the ticket to my first real job on an equities trading help desk. While it was not the path I had planned, I was able to quickly add value and progress in technology. I went back to school for a Master’s of Science at NYU and piled on technical certificates to validate my capabilities and mitigate concerns about my non-traditional path into the depths of technology on Wall Street.
For the next 24 years, I moved through the ranks of technology in different businesses across the financial spectrum. The longest run I had was in fixed income technology, but I have spent time in corporate technology, asset and wealth management, equities trading and the consumer banks.
While I was always ‘the tech guy,’ I had an affinity for the business problem we were solving. I gravitated to complexity in the business, striving to provide a simple and scalable solution to meet the business’ needs. I knew that, at some point, I would move into one of these businesses and help drive the solutions from the other side of the table.
In December 2021, I moved into the Product organization at Chase, finally realizing my destiny and finding my dream-job as Product Owner in Personalization and Customer Insights.
If there’s one thing I want people to know, it’s that it is never too late to find the job you’ve been searching for. While it can seem like a bit of a risk, it is worth it when you get there. Talk to your manager and be honest with them, and yourself, about your goals.