Michael Carmen, B.S. ACC ’84

Senior Vice President and Partner
Wellington Management

You’ve got to go where your passions are. You have to do what you love. All that other stuff will take care of itself.

“You’ve got to go where your passions are. You have to do what you love. All that other stuff will take care of itself,” is the advice Michael Carmen, CFA, gives to the class of 2007.

Carmen has followed his passion through a variety of career moves. After earning an accounting degree, he took a posi¬tion with Goldstein Golub Kessler which he found through the UAlbany Career Services Center. “It was a good start. I put my two years in but didn’t feel that accounting was going to be my career path. In accounting, your job is to look at what happened.” Instead of assessing the past, Carmen wanted to see into the future: picking stocks.

As an internal auditor for Drexel Burnham, Carmen felt he was getting in on the ground floor. He left in the late 80’s before the company was investigated, and after starting work as a research associate for Sanford Bernstein, he found that it was closer to what he wanted to do. Carmen said that he worked ridiculous hours for a few years. “I was not picking stocks – more theoretical. I wanted to get into the ‘buy side.’”

After earning his MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business, he relocated to CIGNA Investments in Hartford and then to State Street Research in Boston.

In 1999, Carmen made what he considers his best career move, to equity portfolio manager for Wellington Management. His long-term performance is solid, compara¬ble to Lipper and Morningstar. He said he appreciates “Wellington’s unbelievable culture, sensational environment and doing what I love to do. People give us money to man¬age and expect us to do a great job. My single most proud moment was when I was elected partner in 2002.”

But, the ’84 grad says, “Career is meaningless without fami¬ly. Family is always first. That’s what it’s all about.” He and his wife Pam, president of the high school and elementary school PTAs, take time off to get away with the kids, Jesse, 16, and Spencer, 12. “We love to travel together – get away from the distractions.” The annual ski vacation each Christmas is the ‘Weekend of No Rules.’ Carmen said, “It’s the best family vacation; we’re all active, all exhausted and never bored.”

Long before children and family, Carmen started his fresh¬man year. He chose accounting based on his aptitude for math and advice from his family. He said, “Accounting is like a language you have never spoken before. Cannon (the late Hal Cannon) intimidated me and sparked me. If you got through his Intro to Accounting class, you could get through any class. I got an ‘A’ – the 3rd or 4th highest grade in the class, my biggest UAlbany accomplishment.”

Carmen’s claim to fame at UAlbany was decidedly not accounting-related. Though he never attended a sporting event, during his freshman and sophomore years he wrote all of the articles for the sports section of the Albany Student Press, obtaining scores and details from the teams. After he was promoted to sports editor in his junior year, he pulled two all-nighters each week (the paper was published twice weekly then) but earned the best grades in his college career. He decided to join the paper’s staff because, “I had always thought I was weak in writing, so I worked on it.”