The Campaign for Sustained Leadership

Helen Frame Peters is the first to admit she's always enjoyed swimming against the tide, starting with her decision to pursue a PhD in finance at Wharton during the 1970s – a time when professors were apt to compare the peaks and valleys of economic models to bikinis and mini skirts.

"Yes, I felt very conspicuous as the only woman in class," says Peters, PhD'79. "But it pushed me to work harder."

Peters' resolve become a hall mark of her atypical career, from her early days as a "rocket science" Wall Street star who was profiled by national media including Business Week and U.S. News & World Report to her current post as dean of Boston College's Carroll School of Business. Says Peters, 51, who as dean of Carroll is only the third female dean of a top 50 business school, "It's important to follow your instincts and ignore the view of the crowd."

Indeed, Peters has. First, as one of a tiny number of female graduate students at Wharton in the 1970s, she worked full time at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia while raising her young son and completing her doctoral dissertation. After finishing her graduate work in the late 1970s, Peters took a "real world" job despite warnings from professors that she would never work in academia if she did. She became an assistant vice president at the now defunct Philadelphia Savings und Society (PS S) to put her research on mortgage backed securities – the subject of her dissertation – into action.

Peters then decided, having led a joint venture between PSFS and Solomon Brothers in the early 1980s, that the best way to apply her work on mortgage backed securities was not at a savings bank like PS S, but on Wall Street. "At that time, PhDs really weren't welcome on the trading side of big Wall Street firms, just the research side," Peters says. "But I felt very strongly that the work I was doing really needed to coordinate with traders. I wasn't willing to be pushed into research."

After turning down research jobs at the largest and most prestigious firms on Wall Street, Peters ultimately found the job she was looking for at Merrill Lynch. "Merrill at that time was not the prestigious firm that it is today. It was considered a retail brokerage firm, but it was growing and developing, and the firm took off," she says.

The mortgage market exploded in the early 1980s, and Peters' brand of quantitative investment strategy was also about to take off. After heading Merrill Lynch's mortgage securities unit, she was scooped up by Security Pacific Bank to become president of its new quantitative investment group. "Quant" divisions and the brainy PhDs who worked in them – dubbed "rocket scientists" by colleagues and the media – became all the rage in the 1980s for their number crunching wizardry. Their work set early standards for what would become common investment practice: using computers and mathematical analysis, rather than hunches, to spot market trends.

But in spite of her soaring career, Peters and her family were growing weary of the Wall Street lifestyle. She and her husband, Judson Garrett Parker, W'70, WG'74, faced a daily commute of more than an hour each way, and were not seeing much of their two children. In 1991, the couple looked for and found jobs in Peters' native Boston: Parker as CFO of the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions and Peters as CIO at Colonial Management Associates, where she initially oversaw $6 billion in fixed income assets – and again found herself swimming against the tide.

"I switched from the sell side – Wall Street – to the buy side. I could also see that things on Wall Street were changing. Now, there was widespread access to data that used to be controlled only by New York firms. So suddenly I was able to do things on the buy side that I had only been able to do on a Wall Street firm before. That enabled me not to be in New York but still do interesting, credible work," she says. Peters remained at Colonial Management until 1998, ultimately serving as CIO and managing $17 billion of investments in equity, fixed income and international securities.

But during her next post, a one-year stint in 1998 managing a $150 billion bond group at Scudder Kemper investments, Peter began thinking about a complete sea change. "It was a merged organization, and merged organizations are challenging," she says. "It was an incredibly high-pressure post, with near-constant international travel and very long hours."

So when the dean's post at Boston College opened up in 1999, Peters applied for the job – and got it. She began her duties last July and says that despite decades in the investment world, and despite warnings from professors that once she left, she could likely never return, she always believed she would eventually come back to academia.

Nine months into the job, she has found that the world of business education is no less demanding than Wall Street. "Our biggest challenge is being relevant in a changing economy as distance learning, alternative schools and corporate schools grow and many students feel they don't need business school to start a new venture," she says. "We also face competitive pressures to keep our outstanding faculty, like every major business school."

In her free time, Peters, who also has a master's degree in statistics from Wharton and an undergraduate degree in economics from Penn, is an ice dancer who skates two or three days a week. Inspired by her daughter Kate, 16, who was a competitive figure skater, Peters took up the sport as a complete novice about five years ago "with much fear and trepidation. Now I can even jump. I love it." Her son, Cole, 25, is a Penn engineering graduate. Peters, who was born in England but grew up in Boston, comes rom journalistic roots: her father was editor of the Boston Globe; her mother directed public relations or educational television.

What has surprised her the most about her recent career change? "The amount of time you spend doing things in so many different areas, whether you are meeting with students or faculty or alumni. There are tremendous demands on a dean in that way without the resources that you'd find at a corporation. You have to be very, very creative to accomplish things. But throughout my career, I've most enjoyed setting up an environment where people can succeed. That's what I intend to do at Carroll."