NOTE: The Senior Close-Up is an occasional feature on the Bard Athletics web site, with the focus being the life of a student-athlete at Bard. Here, every student must complete a Senior Project to graduate. The Senior Project is an original, individual, focused project growing out of the student's cumulative academic experiences. Preparation begins in the junior year, and our course each semester in the senior year is devoted entirely to the Senior Project. The student submits the completed project to a committee of three professors and participates with them in a Senior Project Review.
By Jim Sheahan
Director of Athletic Communications & Marketing
As is often the case with students at Bard College, John Henry Glascock has taken the road less traveled by. And it has made all the difference.
His goals, his interests, his
passions ... are all so different now than they were four years ago. He looks back on it with a smile, marveling about how much he didn't know.
The winding path will take him to a job on Wall Street, starting in August. He was offered and accepted the job before his senior year even began. The details of how he got there are complex, yet the reasons he got there are simple.
Glascock was looking for schools that would offer him a great liberal arts education and the opportunity to continue playing lacrosse. Bard wasn't on his radar until Jan. 15, 2013, his senior year of high school. He ended up in Annandale, thinking he'd be studying political science or philosophy.
His parents, John and Charlene, work at Rutgers and made it clear to their son that he wasn't going to college just to get a job.
"My father is a professor and has been for many years, and he told me to go to a school with small class sizes and good interaction with professors," Glascock recalled. "Some parents want you to know exactly what you're going to do in college and with your career - they made a point of making sure I was more open than that."
He was open, just not open to studying Economics, which he associated solely with finance.
"I had a conversation with a professor who no longer works here that kind of changed everything," Glascock said. "The message was, you can do anything with Econ. I thought it was going to be too math-y. But that discussion opened my eyes to other possibilities."
At the same time, Glascock was wearing a bullseye. Playing goalie for a brand new NCAA Div. III men's lacrosse program is like signing up to have people fire hard rubber balls at you all day. And that's exactly what happened. He faced 565 shots in 14 games as a freshman, then 591 shots in 14 games as a sophomore when Bard joined the Liberty League - one of the most powerful conferences in that sport in the country.
"The volume of shots wasn't anything new," Glascock said, referring to his time as a high school goalie. "But the quality and velocity of the shots definitely changed. It was intimidating, and challenging. I knew I was going to be part of building a program, so I saw it as an opportunity to play right away."
Academically, his interests turned to Economics with a Human Rights slant. After his freshman year, he interned at the National Economics and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI), a non-profit organization in Manhattan. He was also working in development for the Bard Prison Initiative.
Between his sophomore and junior year, he interned at Ford Foundation, doing what he called impact investing.
Last summer he interned in Manhattan for 10 weeks at UBS, a Swiss financial firm with offices in 50 countries. At the end of the internship, he was offered a job 12 months off, and he accepted. He'll be working in Macro Strategy Research, a niche finance opportunity in a global company.
"I love it," Glascock said. "The whole experience brought down the veil on math and economics for me - math especially. I love the academic rigor of the research we'll be doing, and trying to understand market dynamics."
A knee injury sidelined Glascock last spring, so all that's left now is his Senior Project and his final year of lacrosse. The title of his Senior Project will sound something like "Before 'IT' Happens Again: Identifying Financial Fragility."Â He says he's made excellent progress and will finish on time.
As for lacrosse, he's fully recovered from his knee injury and pumped up to try to make an impact as one of the captains on the team. He is also currently the President of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee.
"One thing we've always had at Bard is a great core of talent, and that's still here," Glascock said. "I've been lucky to help build a program, and to play with teammates who are always ready to go."
Barring injury, Glascock is likely to be an Academic All-American candidate in lacrosse, with his 3.88 GPA and stellar play on the field. There has only been one Academic All-American at Bard - Economics and Math double-major Stergios Mentesidis ('12), who finished with a 3.94 GPA and played soccer.
"The Bard experience is what I needed it to be," Glascock said. "I never would have thought I'd find a love for finance and an interest in math. But I've grown a lot, and the responsibility and leadership that was necessary in building a lacrosse program is a big part of my growth as a person."
