Kelly Thomson (MBA ’99): Finding Her Own Path in Finance

When Kelly Thomson (MBA ’99) first stepped into an introductory microeconomics class in college, it wasn’t her idea. It was her father’s ultimatum. “He told me if I didn’t take an econ class, I’d have to pay him back for my college education,” she laughs. In her undergrad education, “that was the extent of anything quantitative.”

That one economics class was a small step that would ultimately lead Thomson down an unexpected path from a Russian language major in New Jersey to the boardroom of a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi.

Thomson fell in love with the Russian language in high school, and her interest grew in college, where she majored in Russian language and minored in political science and women’s studies.

“My dad thought I’d grow up to be a spy,” she says. “It was the mid-‘80s, the height of the Cold War.”

But Russian language jobs were thin on the ground when she graduated, so she took a job at a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., funded by the State Department. While there she read “Banker to the Poor: Micro-lending and the Battle Against World Poverty” by Muhammad Yunus, about the establishment of Grameen bank in Bangladesh, which makes very small loans to people who can’t access traditional banking. “And I thought, this is it. This is what I want to do with my life. I want to go and do micro-lending in former Soviet countries.”

There was just one problem. She didn’t have any finance or economics experience, except for that one class in college. So she decided to go back to school and ended up at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, where she graduated in 1999, and today serves on the Darden School Foundation Board of Trustees.

Darden wasn’t easy at first as a student.

“I was terrified,” Thomson says. “In my first week, I realized that debit doesn’t always mean ‘minus’ and credit doesn’t always mean ‘plus’ in the world of accounting. It really rocked my world, and I thought, ‘I have made the biggest mistake of my life. I’m not going to get through this.’” But she credits “Learning Team Six, the most amazing learning team in the entire world” for helping her succeed. “They kind of carried me through that first semester.”

Kelly’s plan was clear: learn finance, work in a bank, and then go do micro-lending. Everything went to plan, except that the middle step — work in a bank — became her ultimate career. After a summer internship with Citi in New York, she was offered a full-time role and soon found herself climbing the ranks in investment banking. She moved to London with Citi and discovered a niche that appealed to her in project finance.

“You can actually go and kick the tires and see what it is that the money is being spent on,” she said. “I got really interested in that.”

One of her clients was Mubadala, a relatively new investment company owned by the government of Abu Dhabi. Eventually, they offered her a job. Thomson took the leap and moved her young family to the United Arab Emirates, where she would stay for the next decade of her life. At Mubadala, she found an environment full of possibility. “It was like the world was their oyster, and they exploded onto the scene and were just doing so many different things in so many different parts of the world. It was exciting and fun, and everyone was a little bit unconventional.”

She stayed at Mubadala when she moved back to the US in 2017 and helped form its subsidiary Mubadala Capital a few years later, where she is back to building things in a more entrepreneurial mode. “I’ve now been in finance for 27 years, and I’m still doing new things. I think it’s really cool,” she says.

Darden helped her along the way with more than the quantitative skills she needed to break into banking. “Darden teaches you the value of collaboration and partnership,” she says. “From day one with your learning team…it creates people who are comfortable with collective recognition and collective responsibility.”

She links that skill to her success in Abu Dhabi, where consultation and collaboration are more important culturally. “It’s not a place where you get rewarded for being the standout individual; it’s a place where you get rewarded for what your team says about you, or how the firm as a whole does.”

While it was hard to stay connected to Darden in Abu Dhabi, Thomson was eager to get involved when she got back to the States. She now serves on the Darden School Foundation Board of Trustees and previously served on the Darden Alumni Association Board of Directors.

“I’m very passionate about the place. I wouldn’t have the life I have if I hadn’t been at Darden,” she says.

As much as things have changed at Darden since Thomson graduated, the important things remain the same. “I think at its core, Darden is still doing all of the amazing things that it did when I was there,” she said. “And there’s always stuff to do to make things better. I’m excited about just being one single voice in that discussion.”