Falcon Flashback | Nicole Poteat '06

I completed Kindergarten in NY and then my family moved to NC in 1993 for my dad’s job as a professor at Ft Bragg. I joined O’Neal in Mrs. Sikler’s first-grade class as a newly-5-year-old but she quickly noticed that the only letters I knew were N-I-C-O-L-E, so I was sent right back to Kindergarten to repeat the year and learn the alphabet. I stayed at the school for the next 12 years, graduating in 2006.

After graduating from O’Neal I spent a year traveling and trying out a few fields of interest with the hope of narrowing my field of study focus once I started school. I spent a semester working as a legislative intern in DC and was deployed to work on a congressional campaign in PA during that interval. I took a birthright trip to Israel in the winter and stayed a few months to work on a kibbutz in the Negev and explore the Middle East. On the kibbutz I primarily worked in the kitchen and in an olive oil factory, participating in the traditional kibbutz communal living arrangement where everyone contributes what they can and takes what they need.

Upon returning to the US I worked on a project with American Jewish World Service. I was sent to Iowa, one of the early primary states for the 2006 presidential election cycle. I gave bird-dogging and media trainings for Jewish communities across the state, activating them to attend the abundance of candidate events in the state and maneuver to bring attention and platform policy commitments related to a few key AJWS-backed causes: the conflict in Darfur, HIV/AIDS, and environmental protection.

I studied Government at Harvard with a secondary concentration in Visual and Environmental Studies, focused on photography. After graduation I spent another year getting some practical work exposure before starting law school at Boston College.

 

During law school, I had some exposure to finance via a 2L summer internship at Goldman Sachs and decided to take a return offer there to dig into some more exposure to the field. I ultimately navigated into my current role as a Private Banker, merging my interest in client counseling with a content I find endlessly interesting and every-day impactful, finance. I advise individuals, families, and institutions on how to reach their own impact goals and strategically execute. Many of my clients are founders and executives and I love hearing their stories of struggle and success and being able to help them negotiate new territory and challenges along their journeys. I stay very involved in the venture and angel-investing ecosystem via my client focus and as a managing member of Gaingels, a venture syndicate.

I also serve on the executive board of the Ackerman Institute for the Family, a non-profit that provides training and services in the field of family therapy.

I met my wife Emilie at Boston College where she was pursuing her PhD. We moved to NYC after both graduating from grad school in 2015 and got married that year. We now have three daughters, twins Adeline and Birdie, 5 years old, and Elle, 3 years old. We live in Westchester NY. I commute to my office in Bryant Park NYC and Emilie works with a fully remote team as the founder and CEO of Advocate, a venture-backed company.

There are a few highlights that stand out from my lengthy tenure at O’Neal. Mrs. Harris in the third grade provided a classroom environment where I started to really love being good at things like math and reading. She made me want to be competitive and try hard academically. Mrs. Liner in 8th grade gave me a learning infrastructure and let me stretch beyond a standard curriculum via subjects like Latin and advanced math. I still call on that foundation today. Mr. Howell made literary exploration so fun and engaging in high school. And Ms. Garrison was just a total partner in development, of both film and my love of art. I spent hours in her classroom after school working on pieces and putting together a portfolio for college. She remains a close friend. Teachers are incredibly formative and I was lucky to have some great ones at O’Neal.

Sports were also a highlight of my time at O’Neal. The time I spent on the tennis team and soccer team were especially joyful. That’s where I built my closest friendships, got to know people in a special, collaborative environment, and got to have a competitive athletic outlet where we all worked together to very successful outcomes (shoutout to the 2006 girls’ soccer state champion team!) Those experiences led me to join the Harvard rugby team where I experienced the same type of friendship and camaraderie.