When she decided to pursue an MBA in the US, Xiaoyan Jiang realized that most of what little she knew about America came from movies. She applied to Vanderbilt “following an intuition” that the south of China — her home — and the Southern United States might be culturally similar.

A scholarship enabled Jiang to attend Owen, where her instinct proved (mostly) correct. She found that people were very friendly, as they were back home — but also much more relaxed. “The ‘work hard, play hard’ mentality was very evident in Owen’s standing Thursday night happy hour and weekend time off,” she recalls, before adding with a laugh, “This was a huge culture shock for me, and it wasn’t until my second year that I started to relax, just a little bit.” 

From Vanderbilt, Jiang made a name for herself in international banking. She worked for Deloitte Consulting and GE Capital in the US. In Tokyo, she was responsible for GE Capital’s growth in East Asia. Following a stint with Deutsche Bank, she now oversees Multinational Banking for BNP Paribas in New York.

Her passions are to bring private capital from Asia to invest in the US and to take Asian technology companies public. The deals she has completed on stock exchanges in New York, Hong Kong and Singapore total more than $15 billion in value.

Amid all her traveling, Jiang hasn’t forgotten how that trip to Vanderbilt opened new possibilities for her. To facilitate international experiences for Vanderbilt students, she and her husband established the Sheng Family Study Abroad Fund in 2019. The first recipients were MBA students in Professor Ray Friedman’s China Project Course.

“Many students came back saying it was an eye-opening experience,” Jiang says. It was exactly the impact she hoped for.