Alumni Profile: Growing at Goldman Sachs and Giving Back

As a first-generation college student, Carl Peoples (MBA ’94) didn’t have a blueprint for building a career through higher ed. Rather, Peoples says he was “feeling my way along.” Toting an economics degree from William & Mary and a handful of years in retail banking, he found his way to the University of Virginia Darden School of Business in search of something new. Now he’s sporting an 18-year career in investment management in Atlanta, Georgia, at Goldman Sachs, “the best firm to do private wealth management in the world.”

His hunger for challenge made Darden his business school of choice, with its reputation as a rigorous program that facilitated “testing yourself against some of the brightest people you’ll ever meet.” After Darden, corporate and investment banking took Peoples to Atlanta. He resisted suggestions to consider private wealth management. As a “hardcore finance guy,” it didn’t seem serious enough, but he finally agreed to give it a shot and ended up loving it.

Peoples says finding balance is one of the biggest challenges of his career. “Wall Street will take everything you have and still demand more,” he said. “If you allow yourself to work as much as you possibly can for too long, you will have bad outcomes emotionally, physically and professionally.”

…

Peoples connects many of the essential pillars of his life, career and relationships back to Darden and the doors his experience opened. “You would be hard pressed to ever talk to someone who got more out of Darden than I did, and still do,” he said. “As a Black kid from a single parent home, whose mom raised four of us on a teacher’s aid salary, I didn’t know these opportunities existed.”

Read the full profile on Darden’s Alumni Spotlight.