Alumni Spotlight – Jonathon Fisher (UCLA ’09)

December 12, 2018

Jonny Fisher is an alum of our Economics for Leaders program (UCLA 2009) and worked as Program Coordinator for three summers while he was a college student at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jonny has been busy since his time with FTE, interning as a Journalist with Business Insider, a Risk Analyst with Ross Stores Inc. and now as a Data Analyst and Projects specialist on the compliance team at Lyft in Silicon Valley.

Working at Lyft, Jonny gets to utilize many of the leadership principles at the core of the Economics for Leaders program – whether organizing game nights with friends or presenting to executives on both the successes and failures of some of the technical projects that he works on.

Jonny learned a lot from his time with FTE including the ability to speak more confidently and interact better with strangers. Before his involvement with the programs, he had a hard time speaking in front of groups, but now finds himself able to stand and speak in front of large groups of people, an important skill anywhere he goes – whether it’s at the workplace or a college auditorium. “My FTE programs instilled in me the ability to speak confidently in public, no matter what the subject matter. At all of my FTE programs, I had to project confidence in front of everyone out of necessity, which slowly but surely helped improve my public speaking skills.”

The programs also taught Jonny to be more empathetic to strangers. The Economics for Leaders program brings together groups of strangers over a week span and helps them to work as a team and form a bond. Being able to experience this helped him realize the commonalities we all share.

When working as a Program Coordinator, Jonny remembers most the time he got to spend getting to know the students and learning from them. For him, the job, “became less about mentoring and teaching everyone about leadership, and more about interacting with all of the students and using that experience to understand how groups work and succeed at different levels.” He also enjoyed travelling to all different parts of the country!

Students: To learn more about our Economics for Leaders program please click here. Our early application deadline is February 4^th, 2019

Alumni: You can learn more about the opportunity to work as a Program Coordinator here. Accepting applications until February 15^th, 2019