What drives Tatiana Iliczewa is not unusual among professionals: an ambition to do her job superbly and to be rewarded appropriately with growing responsibilities, compensation, and respect. She is well on her way to progress and advance professionally as Director and Senior Credit Officer in Institutional Clients Group, which is part of Citigroup’s risk management organization.

Tatiana has prepared herself to excel, and earning her MS in Risk Management degree through NYU Stern was just the latest rung in her ladder to success. She was born in the former Soviet Union, in Ukraine, and raised in Poland, where she was tracked into math and physics in high school and later economics at the Academy of Economics in Poznan. She did an internship in Washington, D.C., as an exchange student through the International Economic and Commercial Sciences Students Association. She ended up staying in the US and pursuing an MBA at George Mason University while working during summers at Ernst and Young's international finance group.
 
Risk and reward
At Citi, she is responsible for risk management and credit review/recommendations for a portfolio of large cap and middle market loans, derivatives, structured products, real estate, and other complex transactions. All of these require close attention to maintain or re-create desired levels of profitability or to implement a risk mitigation strategy. After joining Citi and being immersed in the evolving regulatory environment, she was motivated to learn more about risk management and best practices in the industry, which led her to NYU Stern’s program for executives.

Although she briefly considered pursuing a PhD in finance and economics, she says Stern was her go-to choice for the MSRM for several reasons: “It is an excellent school, and I had taken executive and continuing education courses there before. I appreciate the school's practical and hands-on approach to business education and excellent faculty. I had always valued the high-quality continued education NYU offers for working professionals.”

The MSRM program exceeded her expectations, she says, describing its “excellent faculty, experienced group of student colleagues, and broad and well balanced curriculum” as its particular strong points. “The MSRM at Stern is an excellent yet rigorous overview of the risk management discipline,” she explains. “Also, while the program is for executives, I found myself learning a lot and putting a lot of effort into my preparatory work, assignments, and exams.  I was looking for a program with academic rigor.” What’s more, what she learned in class was immediately applicable to her day job, she says: “It enabled me to identify relevant risks and assess and challenge the assumptions that underlie the approach of my colleagues within the organization.”

“I am a firm believer in the importance of continuing education,” Tatiana says.