His parents both have MBAs, but Alex Kintzer wasn’t initially inclined to follow in their footsteps. “I had no formal business training, and I shied away from numbers,” he says.

His aspirations are still evolving. His intellectual attraction to the relationship between neuroscience and music—he’s earning an interdisciplinary major at Duke—inclines him toward academia. But an undergraduate course in arts entrepreneurship also piqued his interest in a career in arts management.

Whatever direction he pursues, Alex figured that he would benefit from Vanderbilt’s summer Finance Bootcamp and Accelerator. “The program clearly caters to people in my situation—non-Econ/business majors who want to get knowledge and experience in their area of interest,” he says. “It also seemed like an ideal, intense burst of experience that would be very hard to get otherwise.”

As a triathlete-in-training, Alex knows something about such experiences—and the emotional rush that can accompany them. “The program was incredibly intense,” he says. “Working in such close quarters, on short deadlines, with a group of high achievers is bound to be stressful. But the experience is unparalleled. Everyone will take something different from the program; just wait for your moment.”

What Alex took from the program right away was confidence. He says that the experience “proved to me that non-Econ majors can come together and produce real, convincing projects. It makes me far less apprehensive to join the financial world from a different background.” He also believes that “the best benefits of Owen are to come in the future,” after his planned graduation in 2021 when he can “put all I’ve learned into practice in the real world.”

Maybe that future will even involve a return to Music City. “In 10 years,” he says, “I’ll either be teaching and researching in music and neuroscience or managing artists in Nashville or some other musical metropolis.”

Fun Fact: Alex attended school in England from grades 8-12.

It seemed like an ideal, intense burst of experience that would be very hard to get otherwise.