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Growing Rich - Arabictrader.com

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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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