UTC Rollins College of Business student earns JPMorgan internship 

Ethan Tidwell has always dreamed of working in the city that never sleeps.

A junior double-majoring in finance and accounting at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s Gary W. Rollins College of Business, Tidwell has spent the last three years preparing for the next step of his journey.

This summer, he will finally have the opportunity through a two-month internship with JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York City.

“Getting into JPMorgan wasn’t my goal,” Tidwell said. “It was a byproduct. As an example, if you want to become a good leader, your goal should not be to become a good leader. Your goal should be to become obsessed with the process that it takes to get there.

“This is something that has helped me a lot because then you won’t get disappointed when things don’t go your way.”

Tidwell said it took many years to get to this point, starting when he first declared as a finance major.

Initially, he came to UTC as an accounting major. He said the decision to add finance as a second major came while listening to Robert L. Maclellan and UC Foundation Associate Professor of Finance Hunter Holzhauer in class.

Tidwell then joined the SMILE Fund—a student-led investment fund—and currently serves as the vice president of research and development.

“Ethan has been in the SMILE Fund for a very long time,” Holzhauer said. “I’ve known him from the beginning and he struck me in a couple of different ways. One, analytically, he’s at the top. His brain almost looks for the challenge. He wants to find something that will push him to be better and better and better.”

Tidwell credits Holzhauer, the SMILE Fund and other professors in the Rollins College of Business (RCOB) for preparing him for his opportunity this summer.

“The learning and the resources that UTC provides—especially with the professors—have helped me tremendously, especially in the SMILE Fund,” Tidwell said. “I know there are things that are just UTC general college-related, but the RCOB has probably been the biggest factor in it. The way I like to think about it is that you can go to Ivy League schools and get all this stuff, and you almost get an instant ticket into some of these banks.

“With UTC, you don’t get the instant ticket but you get a stage. You can perform, you can do what you want, you can learn and you have the resources to do everything. We have better ways to learn, especially with the Bloomberg Lab.”

Tidwell was also captain of UTC’s Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute Research Challenge team, which won the Greater Tennessee Challenge for the 10th consecutive year and advanced to the Southeast Regionals.

“Ethan’s a rising star and I’m sure we will be proud of him for many, many accomplishments that he will make throughout his career,” Holzhauer said. “We say SMILE Fund is for life. He will always have a home here and he’ll always have a fan base.”

Tidwell said this process required hard work and intentionality after multiple years of trying to get the JPMorgan internship. He completed internships locally, including this past summer in the Rock City finance department, where he worked on the company’s new gondola project to boost his resume and gain more experience in finance.

“I applied last year and the year before and didn’t really get anything because I had no prior internship experience,” he said. “I didn’t have a ton of financial experience. I guess it was technically last year, but this last semester I applied just kind of like, ‘We’ll see what happens.’

“I wasn’t expecting anything. I got a HireVue (interview) and thought, ‘Oh, I bet they give that to everyone.’ But I studied my butt off because I wanted to learn more about the company and impress the interviewers with my knowledge of it.”

He remembers the exact moment the offer email appeared in his inbox, while he was sitting in the Bloomberg lab, where he had spent countless hours preparing and studying for this opportunity.

“If you are not curious, if you’re not trying to learn, if you’re not willing to learn, you will not get better,” Tidwell said. “It’s important not to doubt yourself in a bad way, but really question, is there a better way to do this? Can I do this another way? Am I right? There are so many different questions you can ask yourself that will lead you down different paths to learn, and then you’ll conceptually understand a lot of stuff, especially in finance. That’s what has helped me.”

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