Kensington Zwerner
Virani Undergraduate School of Business, Rice University
“I’m a hobby-collecting, bad-movie-loving finance student who loves to chitchat.”
Fun fact about yourself: For my senior year, I have been collecting random hobbies including bouldering, boxing and, most recently, running the Houston Marathon.
Hometown: Atlanta, GA
High School: The Westminster Schools
Major: Business with a Finance concentration
Favorite Business Course: Business 343: Financial Management. After working to determine undervalued equities in the Rice Undergraduate Investment Fund my freshman year, Financial Management was the first class where I could dive into the fundamentals of firm valuation and the business decisions that drive these opportunities.
Extracurricular Activities, Community Work and Leadership Roles During College:
- Rice Business Society, Co-president: I led the largest undergraduate business student organization of more than 500 members, introducing students to a variety of business careers and opportunities while cultivating a close-knit culture within a newer undergraduate business school.
- Rice Investment Banking Bootcamp, Co-head of Mentorship: In this role, I’ve worked to form and manage a team of 12 committee members who facilitated a semester-long program consisting of weekly class instruction, a mentorship program, and mock interviews. Additionally, I transitioned our program onto a structured Canvas format and led the program’s first energy-focused interview preparation session.
- Virani Student Ambassador: In the inaugural Virani Student Ambassador position, I have worked to facilitate communication between Virani students and faculty while providing insight to potential new students by leading admissions panels and one-on-one information sessions.
- Rice Undergraduate Investment Fund, Financial Sector Head: I led a team of 10 students to build buy-recommendation pitches based on industry analysis, financial modeling and investment rationale.
Where have you interned during your college career?
- Evercore: Investment Banking Summer Analyst (Energy), Houston
- S&P Global: Commodity Pricing Associate Intern (Power), Houston
Where will you be working after graduation? I will be working at Evercore as an investment banking analyst in the Energy group in Houston, Texas.
Who is your favorite business professor? Professor Brian Rountree taught my Financial Statement Analysis class and remains my favorite business professor at the Virani Undergraduate School of Business. He spent the first class session understanding our career and academic interests and then tailored his lessons around our specific goals. Professor Rountree built a collaborative course where students wanted to dive into each session, and he made sure to incorporate current events to prepare us for our careers after graduation. He leads his class with compassion and creativity — exactly what the Virani School represents.
What advice would you give to a student looking to major in a business-related field? I recommend that all business students take their first year to explore all areas of business: attend a variety of career events, speak to upperclassmen, and network with alumni. Understanding what draws you to a career and exploring every opportunity will help you commit to the best path forward. Then, hit the ground running with networking and interviewing. Having a clear focus and leaning on your school’s support system will be crucial.
Looking back over your experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently in business school and why? If I could restart my time at Rice, I would use my freshman year to explore all of the career opportunities and student organizations on campus. Because I entered Rice with a strong interest in finance, I wanted to focus most of my time on finance courses, internships, and clubs. The Virani Undergraduate School of Business has a wide variety of student organizations spanning almost every career path in business.
What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What is one insight you gained from using AI? The Virani Undergraduate School of Business tailors its teaching of AI for each course, with professors taking time to highlight ways that we can use AI to parse through data, analyze documents, and use programming platforms. In my investments course, we leveraged AI to build code that informed our portfolio makeup, increasing the accessibility of the program for finance students.
Which academic, extracurricular or personal achievement are you most proud of? I am most proud of my contributions to the Rice Investment Banking Bootcamp. I started at Rice just as the first-ever class of freshmen were able to apply to the school as business majors. Then, the resources for finance students were mainly limited to word-of-mouth from upperclassmen and faculty in finance, which made it nearly impossible for students from non-finance backgrounds to break into the industry. In the three years since then, I helped build a full-fledged, student-run program to prepare students to network, learn finance technicals, and become polished enough to excel in high-finance interviews.
What has set our program apart from other successful investment banking programs is its wide accessibility. Rice’s biggest asset is its culture of care and incredible student willingness to help each other succeed. Investment banking recruiting – and business schools as a whole – tend to veer into competition instead of collaboration. We designed the Rice Investment Banking Bootcamp to mirror Rice’s collaborative culture, providing open accessibility to all students without competitive size constraints or interviews. This has allowed us to more than triple the number of Rice graduates entering investment banking in 2026.
Which classmate do you most admire? One of the classmates who has inspired me most is Caroline Mazur-Sarocka. She taught me how to lead with compassion while ensuring high standards — something that I have worked to maintain in my student organizations after she graduated last year. She was never afraid to trust her abilities, becoming one of very few students to pursue private equity immediately after graduation, which has inspired me to chase after what I want.
Who would you most want to thank for your success? I would most like to thank my dad for my success. Growing up, he always instilled in me the importance of hard work and seeking excellence in everything that I do. While I don’t think he necessarily expected me to pursue these values by working long hours in investment banking, I know he is proud that I chose a goal early and went after it.
What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?
1) Constantly innovate and think of new ways to approach problems.
2) Continue giving back to students who want to break into finance — I have had a variety of mentors who have helped me get to where I am today, and I hope to pay that forward.
What made Kensington such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?
“I have had the pleasure of working closely with Kensington Zwerner through my role as a faculty member at the Virani Undergraduate School of Business and through her extensive leadership in Rice’s undergraduate business community. Kensington exemplifies the very best combination of academic excellence, professional maturity, and student leadership. In her role as co-president of the Rice Business Society (RBS), Kensington serves more than 500 undergraduate students and leads the RBS’s investment banking bootcamp — an initiative that has since become a critical pipeline for Rice students pursuing finance careers and reflects her ability to translate institutional knowledge into tangible opportunities for her peers.
Kensington is an exceptional student, as well. She has earned a 3.96 GPA while completing one of the most rigorous finance course loads at Rice. I taught Kensington in my Financial Statement Analysis course, a rigorous, capstone-style class designed to integrate accounting, finance and strategy in the evaluation of corporate performance and firm value. She possesses a remarkable ability to synthesize complex material across disciplines and to push discussions well beyond the surface level, asking questions that often reframe the conversation for the entire class. Just as importantly, she elevates her peers by guiding discussion toward deeper, more insightful territory, demonstrating a level of intellectual leadership typically seen only in advanced doctoral classrooms.
I have been a faculty member at Rice University since 2003 and have taught well over 3,000 of the most capable students in the country. Without hesitation, I can say that Kensington ranks firmly in the top 1% of all students I have ever taught, and she stands among a very small handful who could credibly be described as truly exceptional. We at Rice University not only anticipate great things from her, we are confident she will exceed even the highest expectations placed upon her.”
Brian Rountree
Accounting Area Coordinator and Associate Professor of Accounting
Rice Business
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