Fight the odds and pay it forward
Mamta Chandiram Hotchandani
The most enduring happiness comes from acting in the service of others. My happiest and most fulfilling moments have been when someone remembered and appreciated how I once helped them in their journey. It shows that I've helped build a good community and made a difference in someone's life — that is success for me.
Mamta Chandiram Hotchandani
Bachelor of Business Administration with Honours in Business Management 2014
“You're a third generation Indian in Hong Kong, so you must have come from a privileged background, gone to an international school and attended a top-ranked university in Hong Kong or overseas.” This is a typical comment that Mamta Hotchandani often hears, and her response is always no, no and no. After her denial, she typically gets a follow-up question like “But then, how did you get hired by an investment bank?” “I want to change these perceptions through my story,” Mamta declares. “They did not expect me to be here; yet here I am.''
Mamta, a proud graduate of HKMU, now works at UBS as Chief of Staff and Chief Operating Officer for APAC Investment Bank Operations, focusing on shaping the overall strategic direction in the Asia-Pacific region. In addition to her professional role, she is enthusiastically involved in voluntary work for ethnic minority students in Hong Kong.
Attracted by Hong Kong's financial industry, the Indian Hong Konger had dreamt of entering a top-ranked business school in the city. But her public examination results fell short of her expectations, and she ended up as a rare face in the Lee Shau Kee School of Business and Administration (B&A). That was more than a decade ago, a few years after the University had joined JUPAS. Non-Chinese-speaking students were few and far between at the University. ''I remember the concerned faces of the professors when I arrived for registration,” she recalls. “They explained to me that the tutorials were conducted in Cantonese and asked if I could manage.”
While Mamta is not a fluent Cantonese speaker, she attended every single lecture and tutorial. Fortunately, she made a group of good friends. “Some of them helped translate the tutorial lessons for me,” she says gratefully. “Although we're all grown up now and in different places, I'll never forget them.” This appreciation of being helped went on to shape her belief in “paying it forward”, which continues to drive her voluntary work today.
Mamta had to overcome a lot of barriers on her way to becoming an investment banker. First, the then OUHK was excluded from many corporations' external programmes for university students. Second, there were even fewer opportunities for non-Chinese speakers. Unwilling to take no for an answer, she signed up for every single competition and programme that came her way. The professors, who had always been sympathetic and supportive of her, came to appreciate her hard work and determination. “After a year and a half, the Dean at the time called me in and said, 'For you, we'll change all the tutorials to bilingual,'” she says. This experience validated one of her favourite quotes: ''It's hard to beat a person who keeps showing up every day. It shifts from winning to outlasting – a very different game.''
With the support of her teachers, Mamta came a close second in the inaugural Hong Kong Outstanding Business Students Award, a competitive contest that spanned three rounds over six months, winning her first internship experience at a multinational firm, Ernst & Young. But despite her best efforts, she failed to get into a graduate programme in a large corporation. For half a year after graduation, she searched relentlessly for a desirable job while working as a private tutor. She points out that in addition to the language barrier, many big companies would filter out applicants who did not meet their preset criteria, which prevented her from advancing to the interview rounds. “I was told many times that I wouldn't be able to make it with my university background,” says Mamta. Finally, after sending over 100 applications, she was hired as an analyst at Credit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank to support traders in London and Paris. Using this opportunity as a stepping stone, she moved on to UBS a year later. From there, she has worked steadily up the career ladder.
Today, Mamta is fighting for equal resources and opportunities for ethnic minority students who share her past struggles and aspirations. Among the community projects she is part of, she feels particularly connected to EMPOWER by The Amber Foundation, a year-long career-development programme aimed at enhancing the visibility of female ethnic-minority university students to financial institutions and many other professional corporations. In addition to serving as a mentor, she is heavily involved as an Executive Committee member in organising workshops by women in senior positions, networking and lining up internships for students. “EMPOWER will always be close to my heart,” says Mamta, who started out as a voluntary mentor, but was quickly identified as a person who had lived through the entire experience and was invited to serve as an Executive Committee member. “Growing up, I never had a mentor who assured me it was possible to get to where I wanted to go. I wish I had access to a programme like this when I was a student,” she says.
Mamta's professional experience and voluntary efforts led to her being shortlisted for the Diversity List 2020: Women's Voice, by The Zubin Foundation, an annual exercise to identify high-calibre non-Chinese Hong Kong citizens for recommendation to sit on government statutory and advisory bodies. While COVID-19 disrupted many government routines that year, she was invited by The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology to be a lay leader in ''MindMatters'', a government-funded project promoting mental health awareness among the local ethnic minority communities. Along with her fellow leaders, she created videos and participated in outreach programmes to break the mental health taboo among Hong Kong's ethnic minority communities. She was also invited to give a talk, titled “A Banker's Journey”, in which she shared with students how she navigated her education and career journey, proactively chasing opportunities and fighting all the odds stacked against her.
“I won't forget how the students came up to me afterwards to tell me how refreshing it was to hear an authentic journey and practical advice, especially from an ethnic minority woman instead of a stereotypical finance professional. My journey also gave them hope that there are multiple ways to get to a destination,'' she says.
Asked what she has learnt from her voluntary work, Mamta quotes the late US Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “Fight for the things that you care about. But do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” She has been able to spread awareness of the systemic challenges faced by ethnic minority Hongkongers through the community programmes that she is part of, as well as platforms such as TedXTinHauWomen, where she was recently featured as a change-maker. “I hope my voice today represents many other minorities who went to a local school in Hong Kong, are under-represented in many professions and face the same struggles when it comes to their goals and dreams,” she says.
On a personal level, Mamta has established such close ties with the students that when she was forced to take a few months' break to take care of her hospitalised mother, heart-warming messages poured in. “The most enduring happiness comes from acting in the service of others,” she says contentedly. “My happiest and most fulfilling moments have been when someone remembered and appreciated how I once helped them in their journey. It shows that I've helped build a good community and made a difference in someone's life — that is success for me.” Looking to the future, she hopes to start her own non-profit venture one day and continue to spread awareness of the struggles of ethnic minorities, the value of socio-economic diversity, and the importance of paying it forward. As a strong advocate for diversity and the development and advancement of leadership of Hong Kong's ethnic minorities and women, she is very active in sharing her experience and expertise through both volunteering and informal mentoring within and beyond her network. The HKMU alumna also hopes to connect with more HKMU students to encourage them to chase their dreams.
