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GROWING RICH WITH GROWTH STOCKS<br />
mother had worked on the column out of college a generation earlier.<br />
“The woman who wrote the column before I came along wanted to<br />
take a leave of absence to write a book. After interviewing me and<br />
at the very end checking my handwriting to get a sense of my personality,<br />
she hired me,” Bramwell says. “She was a great teacher and<br />
very wise woman. I learned how to write newspaper style, using the<br />
inverted pyramid. I didn’t realize at the time that there were different<br />
ways of writing and that the way you write term papers is different<br />
from the way you write newspaper articles. I learned how to write<br />
succinctly, striking out all the adjectives, and putting the most important<br />
things first, in case the reader didn’t finish the whole article. It<br />
was the best writing course I ever had. I also learned how to research<br />
and back everything with written documentation. Among the many<br />
sources I referred to was a phenomenal morgue of old newspaper<br />
clippings.”<br />
COLUMBIA BOUND<br />
After 18 months of responding to inquiring minds, Bramwell returned<br />
to New York, edited chemistry books for John Wiley & Sons,<br />
and began to question the direction of her career. Her roommate<br />
worked for the investment department at Chemical Bank, and another<br />
college friend was at the Harvard Business School. In her mind, their<br />
lives were more exciting than hers, so she decided to explore other<br />
options. “I started taking night courses at City College’s Baruch School<br />
of Business, studying subjects such as accounting and security analysis,”<br />
Bramwell says. “The investment business was exciting, measurement<br />
was quantitatively objective (in that stocks went up or down),<br />
and I decided that a master’s in business administration was the degree<br />
for me, even though there weren’t many women working on Wall<br />
Street at that time. However, I wasn’t excited about writing the yearlong<br />
thesis that Baruch required. So I went up to Columbia University’s<br />
Graduate Business School and told the dean of admissions that I<br />
wanted to transfer to Columbia. I started my first class in September<br />
1966 and graduated with an MBA in finance a year later.”<br />
Bramwell loved her time at Columbia. “The students there knew<br />
why they were going to school,” she says. “They had a game plan in<br />
mind for their lives and were seeking knowledge that could be applied.<br />
That’s still true today.” Bramwell was one of only three women out<br />
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