How Finance Club Set This Alum on His Career Path

When Hugo Beal enrolled at Bellevue College, the plan was mainly to raise his GPA as a Running Start student.

And while the now 20-year-old did improve his academic profile, he also found community and a career path.

It all came together when Beal, who grew up on Mercer Island and graduated from Mercer Island High School in 2024, took over running the Finance Club at Bellevue College. During his tenure, the club grew to more than 60 members, with roughly 40 members regularly attending their meetings every week. He said it was an honor to lead one of the largest student-run clubs on campus, as well as one of the fastest-growing ones.

“It was a really great time. I think that it made an impact on a lot of different people there,” Beal, who attended Bellevue College from 2024-25, said. “There was, at one point, a lot of people joining the club even if they weren’t necessarily from a finance background—just because it was a thriving student community.”

The aim of the Finance Club was to hold discussions about stocks, finance, crypto, investing, and business news, as well as career options in the industry. The club was open to students of all experience levels when it comes to finance, and Beal said the whole idea was to make it accessible for people who may not have the most knowledge or the most understanding coming in.

“And that’s kind of the demographic at a community college, where people are trying to understand what it is they’re interested in,” he said. “That was exactly, for sure, the case with me.”

In addition, while Beal was head of the club, they received funding from student government for club trips, which took them to New York and San Francisco. These trips were for students to get firsthand exposure to financial epicenters. On these trips, Beal coordinated 10-plus meetings and events with professionals in investment banking, private wealth management, and other finance-related roles as guests.

“This was certainly one of the most influential and significant pieces of the club, and really reinforced our relationships within it,” he said. Beal’s time in the Finance Club—as well as the classes he took at Bellevue College—helped him figure out an academic and career path. Although he thought he would do something business-related when he was younger, he is now studying finance at Durham University in Durham, England, where he is about to start his second year of a three-year undergraduate program. Beal said he’s most likely going to go into investment banking after he graduates. He is also the incoming president of the Finance Society, which is the school’s biggest society with more than 4,000 members.

“Bellevue College, as a school, I think really set me up, but I have to say that I think the club and everything we did with that was maybe one of the more helpful things, personally, to understand exactly where I want to go, what I want to do, and really the practical aspects of a young person’s career,” he said.

Finance and Friendships

Another key component of the Finance Club was the connections, as Beal said many people formed friendships through the club, and these relationships are still going strong, even after folks left Bellevue College. For someone who was going through a transition period in his academic career—living at home while hearing from his high school friends who were at various schools around the country, going to football games, pledging for fraternities, and experiencing other rites of passage—Finance Club helped him find his people. From Monopoly nights at his house, to dinners together, to meetups in Seattle, the club connected Beal with like-minded individuals who he could relate to.

“I like to think about it as becoming a big friend group,” he said. “We had all sorts of hangouts and stuff outside of the club.”

Beal said Finance Club gave him the balance he needed from his full course load, as he maxed out on all of the credits he was allowed to take per quarter. And if he hadn’t been part of the club, he said he probably would have ended up doing something similar, some other way, whether that would have meant joining a statewide organization or an online community.

Creating Opportunities and Building Support

In the year that he attended Bellevue College, Beal spent half of it as a Running Start student and half as a full-time student.

While he was enrolled, Beal knew he had to make things happen for himself in order to get to where he wanted to be. And that meant hard work. So he made sure to surround himself with people who felt the same way and were going through something similar, creating his own support system everywhere he went, from the Finance Club to the math lab—the latter of which he credits for helping him improve in the subject.

“Those were the struggle times,” he said, about the work he put in to improve his grades. “And the people that were going through that with me, and figuring out what we wanted to do, and just doing what it took to get there, honestly, are what make up the good memories for me.”

As a student, Beal spent all day, every day on campus at Bellevue College. Not because he lived far away, but because the facilities were really helpful. There was also “tons of support from staff,” most notably, Keith Rowley, advisor of the Finance Club, who Beal described as “the best,” as well as Brad Huggins, director of Student Engagement. Beal also said he had some really good, and really passionate professors in the classroom.

One piece of advice Beal has for students at Bellevue College is to take advantage of office hours. He said they are unbelievably helpful because not many people go to them, and so he would often be the only person there and would basically receive one-on-one tutoring from professionals in their fields.

It’s these types of opportunities at a community college—as well as ones you create for yourself, like he did in restarting the Finance Club—that Beal said can really create the type of experience someone has as a student. The power of free will and personal motivation are unbelievably important, he said.

“I didn’t have a community when I came there. It was not until I made it all work for myself that it did (work for me),” he said. “I think a lot of people feel sometimes things are out of their control, and oftentimes things are out of your control. But there’s just so much stuff that I think people overlook that they have the ability to do.”