NP<\/strong>: My career is in its 50th year and I continue to work for my own investment advisory company. It’s all been in the financial services industry. It’s been with a list of institutions too numerous to list. The most important lesson that I have learned along the way is that particularly in an industry like financial services, which has a lot to do with confidence and trust and respect, treating the customer fairly and transparently is paramount. Treating the customer right has been the thing that I have been most interested in doing over my career.<\/p>\n BL<\/strong>: Is there anything that you learned at Trinity that you’ve used or that has helped you in your career? This can include technical skills that you learned, knowledge that you learned in your government class, liberal arts skills, soft skills that you think have helped you with those interactions with customers, things like that.<\/p>\n NP<\/strong>:\u00a0 I don’t think it has anything to do with technical skills. Most of what I learned at Trinity, I applied in the soft skill area. Trinity was a good place to develop a balanced approach. My education at Trinity was as much about listening as it was about talking. This helped my ability to get on well with my customers and be respected by them. I think what they would all say about me is that I called it straight, albeit with a positive spin. I’m sure I’ve been overly optimistic in my time and I’m certainly the glass is half full kind of a person. BL<\/strong>: A lot of alums have been talking about what you were saying, the people skills that they’ve learned and their ability to listen as much as to communicate their thoughts and ideas effectively, both written and verbally. So that’s great. What would you say is your proudest accomplishment since graduating Trinity?<\/p>\n NP<\/strong>: Oh boy. I think I’ll come back to something I said a little while ago. I’ve worked with many institutions in the investment business and come to know a lot of people. I don’t think any of them would say that I am not a person of integrity. The securities business is a subset of the financial services business. Being a person of high integrity has lent itself to certain aspects of this business. It used to be a commission-driven business, which it is no longer. Maintaining your integrity in a commission-driven environment is hard to do because of course the motivation is, the more and more of this you do, the better it’s going to be for you. But maintaining one’s integrity and putting the interest of the client first in an environment where the incentive was just to sell more, that has taken some doing. And I think my record is pretty good on that front.<\/p>\n BL<\/strong>: That’s a great accomplishment. As you know, we have so many students that are looking to go into fields very similar to yours. So I think that that’s definitely a great accomplishment that will encourage them and inspire them to do just the same. So I think that’s a great anecdote to share. My last question is very broad. Are there any other hobbies, passions, projects, milestones, or really anything else that you would like the Trinity community to be aware of?<\/p>\n NP<\/strong>: Outside of my work, I’ve been involved with a variety of different institutions in the non-profit area. I’ve always been able to get quite a lot of satisfaction out of being in service to others. I’ve done a lot of things that I think have helped others and recently I’ve spent a lot of time helping people be more philanthropic than they ever thought they could be. So, I think I must have learned along the way that there’s satisfaction to be gained in being useful to other people and giving back to the community that you started in. And I must have learned that somewhere and Trinity is probably the place.<\/p>\n BL<\/strong>: I take you to be very modest about your, about your philanthropic pursuits. I think that making the conscious decision to help others and use some of your free time to help others is not a decision that everybody makes. But those are all of the questions that I have for you. I don’t know if you have any others for me.<\/p>\n NP: It hasn’t yet come to much, but over the course of the last couple of years, I have been trying to help the Trinity Investment Club. This last year, I have spent a lot of time with Alex Hreib the President of the Club. My children aren\u2019t interested in what I have learned during the time I’ve spent in the investment world. So I feel there’s got to be somebody out there like Alex to whom I could pass on some insight. Providing investment advice is a pretty humbling business. Trying to be useful to the Trinity Investment Club, trying to be a good mentor to these students who have an interest in a very difficult, \u201chard to get your handle on\u201d business has been rewarding. Investing is a world you never fully understand. That’s the beautiful part about it. But I’m trying to be helpful and this gives me some personal fulfillment having spent a lot of time in this industry and hoped that I could pass a little bit of it on to somebody else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Interviewed by Brooke LePage \u201819 BL: In terms of work, career, or family, what have you done since leaving Trinity? NP: My career is in its 50th year and I continue to work for my own investment advisory company. It’s all been in the financial services industry. It’s been with a list of institutions too…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2584,"featured_media":436,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[74,37,75,49],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/bantamstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/bantamstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/bantamstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/bantamstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2584"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/bantamstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/bantamstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":465,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/bantamstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions\/465"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/bantamstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/bantamstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/bantamstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/bantamstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/bantamstories\/files\/2020\/01\/nat-p.jpg\")
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