Stacy Bash-Polley ’89

Partner-Managing Director, Goldman Sachs

Nobody handed me a business to run –
but that gave me the chance to build one I really believed in.

Stacy Bash-Polley decided to follow the advice college counselors regularly give to graduating seniors: If you think you’d ever like to get an MBA, take the GMAT (Graduate Management Aptitude Test) now. “I didn’t know if I would want to go to business school,” says Bash-Polley, “But I decided that the test would help me keep my options open.” She also followed Assistant Dean John Levato’s advice to log some work experience before making any decisions about graduate school. Bash-Polley said that even though Albany is technically a big school, “it felt small because everyone knew John Levato; he gave good advice and made you feel someone was looking after you.”

Three years post-graduation, after consulting in Ernst &Young’s Information Technology practice, Stacy decided she was ready for the next challenge. She was thrilled when the she was accepted into the Wharton School. From her peers at Wharton, Stacy learned about many different industries in which she could apply her technical background and she decided to focus in on Wall Street. “I worked hard to get a summer associate job so that I could learn more before committing to a fulltime job after graduation. Relative to my Wharton peers, I just didn’t know as much about the world of finance.” Stacy’s diligence paid off: Goldman Sachs hired her as a Fixed Income Sales and Trading Associate.

Two months later, while Bash-Polley was still in a training program, many of Wall Street’s biggest firms, including Goldman Sachs, reduced the size of their work forces to respond to challenging market conditions. “It was a lesson I never forgot: Businesses are cyclical and you have to make yourself valuable to your company to ensure you’ll even get the chance to build a career. I was lucky to have a job and I was going to give it everything I could.” She worked hard at developing relationships with clients to turn them into some of the most important clients in the firm. She learned that the toughest tasks were the ones with the biggest rewards, “I liked the challenge of building something from the ground up. Nobody handed me a business to run - but that gave me the chance to build one I really believed in.”

As the head of Rates and Mortgage Sales, Bash-Polley now takes pride in teaching and mentoring. She has worked on many initiatives for women, noting, “I still don’t have a lot of women role models. Six years ago, when I had my first child, I realized that there had to be women on Wall Street struggling with similar issues to mine.” She applied her experience in building client relationships to developing a network of these women so that they could share stories and solutions. “Over time, this network will educate senior women to provide better mentorship for Wall Street’s newer women professionals than was available to us.”

Looking back over the years, Stacy traces the groundwork for her successful career to the University at Albany. Her math ability and interest in computers drew her to our School of Business, where she was introduced to finance. In particular, she remembers that Professor Ron Forbes brought the practical application of finance into the classroom, and inspired her to think broadly about the many career paths she might pursue. “Hard work is what helped me make the most out of every opportunity, and I began to build this work ethic at University at Albany.”

Bash-Polley is married to Douglas Polley; a fellow Wharton graduate who is a portfolio manager at a NY based hedge fund. They and their two sons Ethan, age 6 and Owen, age 3 live in New York City.