Lora Chow
speaker
120 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Lora Chow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That's the best piece of advice I've ever got.
Yeah, I totally agree with you. And there are a few things I do that I think really clarify my purpose, like meditation, journaling, and just visualizing your success. And that helps a lot.
You're very welcome. It's my pleasure to talk to you. Yeah, very happy to share my experience.
Welcome to my show. Hi, Vince. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be on your podcast.
Sure. I am Laura Chow. I'm from Hong Kong. I'm a composer, a singer, and a multi-instrumentalist. I'm also the co-founder of two music organizations, the Yale Alumni Chamber Music Society of Hong Kong and Virtuoso Fiesta, which I founded with a friend also from Yale, a violinist named Ruda Lee last year in Hong Kong. Actually, in 2023 in Hong Kong, we co-founded Virtuoso Fiesta.
So I'm very passionate about creating music that inspire positive changes in the world. And my background is that I studied music and economics at Yale College. And after graduation, I pursued a career in finance from being a prop trader in investment bank to a portfolio manager in a hedge fund. And I spent over 10 years analyzing stocks, learning about the financial markets, making returns.
But always on the side, I've been doing music as a performer, as a composer, and as an administrator and trying to make changes in the music scene in Hong Kong to hopefully allocate more resources in the music scene and to promote the transformative power of music.
Sure. I was always very passionate about music. I started the piano at four and learned different instruments, played in orchestra, sang in choirs, and I always wanted to be a musician, but I always also got the impression that it's impossible to be a musician in Hong Kong.
where I was born and where it's a financial hub it's very unrealistic and it's very difficult to make a living and I'm not from a wealthy family so I do have to be practical and of course there are also pressure from my traditional parents just giving me the idea that it's very important to have a stable income and it's much easier to be a professional and to have a high standard of living.
And being a musician is very challenging and competitive, tough life. With all these impressions in my mind, and I was doing quite well in my academic study, I was pretty good at math. My mom majored in math and she actually influenced me a lot. So at first, when I was around 17, thinking about college, I thought about majoring in math.
And I even applied to the University of Cambridge to major in math and got an offer from them. Almost went there, but at the same time, I applied to the US colleges because I know about the liberal arts education and the possibility to do a double major. So my goal is to do music with something practical.
At first I was thinking music and math because I was just pretty good at math and did the math Olympiad and all those in high school. And then I regretted for applying to math major in the UK because my heart still really leans towards music. But I'm very grateful that Yale offered this great liberal arts program and I could decide on my major after I got in, which is awesome.
I think it's very important to try different things and find out what we really love. And because Yale offers this opportunity, in freshman year I took some math courses and I discovered that I'm not really that into math. And I prefer economics, which is way more applicable to the real world. And that's why I chose economics as one of my majors. And then for music, it's always my passion.
love and passion so I always wanted to study music and of course Yale is the best Ivy League school with professional music school. So that's why I applied early action to Yale and I'm very grateful I got in and could do both economics and music. I feel like I have a safety net in case music does not work out and at the same time I can explore different interests.
I was actually pretty interested in economics as well because It gives me a great perspective about the real-life experience, about how different companies run, how a lot of industries work in the world. So I'm very glad I did both.
I had really great experience with music at Yale. I sang in the professional chamber choir Yale School of Cantorum and I sang in a lot of the opera there. I was cast as one of the leading role in an Italian opera. And these experiences are really wonderful and my dreams came true. But when I was in my junior year, I got a lot of pressure from my peers.
Everyone who majored in economics were applying for internships at investment banks. And of course, my parents were also encouraging that, like many other Ivy League parents. especially from Asia, also encouraged that. And there was a good reputation from investment banks about how they take in the smart kids and gave amazing training to them and have a wonderful future ahead.
So I was part of that group. I just followed the crowd to apply online, all these internships with different banks. I did the interviews. I remember Morgan Stanley even flew me to Hong Kong for just one day to do the interview and then back to the US the next day. And it really impressed me how much they invested in college students.
And also it widened my horizon during the interviews about how trading floor works, how financial markets are so exciting. So I thought to myself, let's try the internship. It doesn't hurt. I spent my sophomore summer in Italy singing opera. So junior year, I decided that I would come back to Hong Kong to do an internship with Morgan Stanley. And it went really well.
I won the trading game during the internship and I got a full-time offer at the bank, which was pretty lucrative. And I missed Hong Kong, too. It's my hometown. My family is here and they wanted me to come back as well. And Hong Kong is a financial hub. There's no full time job for opera singer.
Showing 21–40 of 120 · page 2 of 6
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