When Rob Dyer ’13 arrived at Wabash on Freshman Saturday, he saw the seniors and doubted he would ever be “as good as them.”
“I’ve always had very bad imposter syndrome,” says the native of Fairfax, Virginia. “Looking around at the people in that crowd (freshman peers) and knowing how inexperienced and new everyone was, it felt like an impossibility that one of us could go on to be the president of the student body, run the Sphinx Club, or quarterback the football team.”
The economics major began his studies working toward a law degree. As a senior, he decided law school wasn’t for him and changed course.
“Knowing when to change your mind, and in some cases, knowing when to admit you are wrong, is a huge strength,” says Dyer, who is now the quarterback of his team as a director at Guggenheim Investments, a global asset management and investment advisory firm with more than $217 billion in total assets.
“One of the nice things about Wabash is that it gives you an opportunity to experience such a breadth of fields and ways to approach things,” he says. “So many people I work with decided who they were going to become before they graduated from high school. Wabash gave me the ability to make that decision a lot later on and I’m much better for that.”
Dyer says it was his ability to ask questions and search for answers that originally got him in the door with Guggenheim in 2013.
Anne Walsh, chief investment officer for Guggenheim Partners Investment Management and managing partner of Guggenheim Partners, told a story about Dyer’s interview with the firm. A question came up: “What do you know about insurance asset management?”
“Nothing,” was Rob’s reply.
“What would you do if Anne gave you an assignment dealing with insurance asset management?
“He said, ‘The one thing I wouldn’t do is ask Anne. She’s too busy,’” Anne remembers. “He said, ‘I’m going to find out.’ That was the clincher. He was going to find out and think.”
Dyer has grown tremendously in the industry in the past decade, especially for someone who entered the field with comparably little experience. He’s learned to trust in the answers he and his team find, and to not be afraid of change.
“Especially in the investing world, people can get so married to some investment thesis, and you can run model after model after model justifying that your belief is the right one. But that doesn’t mean the market will ever agree with you,” he explains. “You don’t want to get stuck in one worldview.”
Dyer says he understands that it can feel overwhelming at the start of a career as the “gulf between somebody who’s new to the industry versus someone who’s been there for five years is enormous.” But, as he emphasizes to Guggenheim’s junior employees, the experience is additive.
“As you get better at your job, the work also gets harder. And the reward for doing a good job is more and harder work,” says Dyer. “It’s something that is built up little by little, day by day. There’s no eureka moment that got you there, but you might have a eureka moment when you realize how far you’ve come.”