Sandra Ramalhete still remembers her first day at school in this country. She was 10 years old and has just arrived in the United States with her parents, “who came over to give us a better life and better opportunities,” she said. She spoke no English, and when she walked into the sixth-grade class with an interpreter, she was surprised to see her classmates and teacher dressed in strange costumes. It was Halloween and the beginning of her crash course in American culture, customs and language.
She was a fast learner. Most of her first year was spent in English as a Second Language classes, but by the time she was promoted to seventh grade, “I was fluent in English,” she said. “I really didn”™t have a choice but to learn it.”
Today she is fluent and literate in three languages ”“ Portuguese, English and Spanish, and she uses all three in her position as assistant vice president at the Shelton office of HSBC Premier. But she almost didn”™t make it to HSBC. “When I was younger, I wanted to be an attorney,” she said, earning a bachelor of political science degree from Southern Connecticut State University after graduating from Shelton High School in 1998.
“I spent some time through college in an internship at Bridgeport Superior Court, and worked with a few different law firms,” mostly in criminal law for defense attorneys. After those experiences, “I felt it wasn”™t the industry I wanted to go into,” she said of lawyering. “I wanted to deal with people in a better part of their lives, rather than in something a little more negative.”
Instead, she joined First Investors Corp. in North Haven, earning licenses to sell investments and insurance. “It always appealed to me to help people plan for their future, to help them achieve their dreams,” she said. “I know how hard it is, especially with my family background.”
Ramalhete “came from a rural area, a very small town in the mountains of Portugal,” she said. “My parents worked the land, and we would sell some of the products we grew and trade with other people” for the necessities of life. “I know how hard and challenging it can be to commit to a financial plan, to make your retirement goals and dreams come true.”
After about 30 months at First Investors, she joined Wachovia”™s New Canaan branch in 2001, dealing with the bank”™s high-net-worth client base as a financial specialist. That position “allowed me to have an overall reach with financial products and planning and banking.” Three and a half years later she joined HSBC in November 2006 when it opened its first Fairfield County office because “its global approach and presence was a big appeal.”
(HSBC, by the way, “doesn”™t stand for anything any more,” she said. “Originally it meant the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Company.” Now it deals in everything from banking and credit cards to international mortgages to overall wealth management, she said.)
Her role, she said, “is to be a single point of contact for clients, helping them with their banking, dealing with business owners, and putting plans together to achieve their goals for retirement or other plans they might have.”
And while Ramalhete enjoys the challenge of dealing with the organization”™s international clients ”“ “whether they are working, living or retiring in other counties, I can facilitate all their financial needs at any level” ”“ she also enjoys bringing the scope and challenge of the global economy into Shelton classrooms through her involvement with Junior Achievement (JA).
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“I graduated from Junior Achievement”™s after-school high school program,” she said. That high-visibility program challenges JA student volunteers to decide on a product to sell, create a marketing plan, make the product and sell it. “We started from scratch creating really fancy pens and sold them at the high school,” she said. “We actually did very well.”
Junior Achievement also has less hands-on programs, with volunteer businesspeople going into classrooms from pre-school to high school to teach some basics of capitalism. “Each class has a different curriculum,” she said. “Volunteers teach for an hour once a week for six weeks during school time.”
Ramalhete can draw a straight line from her Junior Achievement experiences to her position at HSBC. “I joined HSBC partly because it was a new company to the Fairfield County market,” she said, just as those fancy JA pencils were something new to the local market. And HSBC Premier is returning the favor, paying for the curriculum materials for a seventh-grade class in Shelton and the second-grade class at McKinley Elementary School in Fairfield, and fielding more than 40 HSBC volunteers to teach JA classes.
Ramalhete is also a member of the Greater Valley Junior Achievement board, helping the board with fundraising ideas and encouraging local companies to support Junior Achievement efforts in local schools. She”™s also planning for her June wedding and she continues to sketch out her entrepreneurial future. “I have visions of having properties all over the world that I can use for myself or rent out,” she said ”“ including her native Portugal where her parents plan to retire in the next few years.
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