Meet the Woman Who Ends the Search

There is a particular kind of person every organization quietly depends on. You recognize them by a single sentence, the one people say when a problem has been circling a room for too long: “Let’s reach out to Katherine. Now we’ll get it solved.”

Katherine Zhang grew up in China, studied mathematics at Beijing Normal University, spent three years as an underwriter at a Chinese bank, earned a place at the London School of Economics, and then crossed the Atlantic again to complete an MBA at the University of Chicago.

Three top-tier institutions on three continents. Ask her how, and she will not mention intelligence. She will say, simply, “persistence.” But listen longer, and something more interesting emerges.

When she first arrived at LSE, her English was not strong enough to follow the lectures. She had never studied econometrics. The program failed two students every year regardless of effort, and she believed she was near the bottom of the class.

For an entire year, she studied every weekday and every weekend. She did not go anywhere. She did not take a break.

 Then an exchange program opened up with the University of Chicago. Most of her classmates did not see it for what it was. Katherine did. A year of disciplined work had lifted her into contention, and she recognized the door the moment it opened. She applied. She was accepted.

When she graduated from Chicago in 2002, the telecom bubble had burst. Classmates were flying back to Asia. She stayed, spent six months on a single job search, studied Basel on her own because the industry demanded it, and landed at Bank One, the top bank in Chicago.

Not because she was the most brilliant candidate in a recession, but because she refused to let the market define what was possible for her.

“I’ve never thought about a situation where I would fail,” she says now. “If I want something to happen, I work toward it. Nothing could stop me.”