David Moss '08
David Moss '08
With a passion for problem solving, David Moss '08 is headed to a large global consultancy firm. It’s a world he’s familiar with, having worked as a hedge fund analyst at J.P. Morgan and as a trading associate at Banc of America—where, at the age of 24, he was part of a small team investing more than $1 billion in hedge funds for the bank’s outsourced proprietary trading platform. Moss applied to law school after working with a mentor who credited his distinctive edge in business to legal training. A self-described “numbers guy” (he earned a degree in finance from Indiana University in 2001), Moss says the transition to reading hundreds of pages of case law was a struggle.
He was impressed by opportunities at HLS for students to design their own law school experiences. During his 1L year, he helped develop a new student group, the Harvard Association for Law and Business. By his 2L year, he was president. Drawing on a large network of alumni business leaders, he developed a speaker series and helped gain corporate sponsorship for the organization, which now has 600 student members. He says he’s going to miss the dialogue inspired by a classroom of people facing the same challenge: “Where else will you be exposed to so many different points of view on a single issue?” Thinking about issues from different angles and recognizing the breadth and validity of others’ arguments have also changed his approach to problem solving, he says, making him more analytic. “I used to do more of the shoot from the hip, go with my gut,” he says. “I think that’s appropriate at times. But in a lot of situations, you’re better off sitting down, thinking through your alternatives.”
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