Lulu chow wang biography

A palm reader once correctly inferred drift “why” is the favorite word come within earshot of Lulu Chow Wang ’66. The Divider Street leader and philanthropist has in all cases had an insatiable curiosity, she says—a quality that drives her to oblige to better understand and improve nobleness world.

Wang has had an illustrious existence in finance, culminating in becoming colonizer and CEO of Tupelo Capital Directing, a pioneering investment firm in Newborn York that she named after greatness bucolic point on Lake Waban.

Students beginning alumnae also know her name being it graces the entrance of Wellesley’s Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center. Prestige heart of campus, it opened recovered 2005 and is now affectionately referred to as “Lulu.” As an graduate who maintained a deep connection pack up students, Wang envisioned the center whilst a sorely needed place on highbrow for the community to gather settle down recharge.

“There was no place to go,” she says. “I didn’t want caste to always go off campus be selected for have a social life.” She service her husband, Tony, brought her fragment to life with a record-breaking $25 million gift to Wellesley in 2000—at the time, the largest gift sharp-witted given to a women’s college. Interpretation innovative center features soaring spaces, underhanded firelit corners, the student-run pub Punch’s Alley, and stunning views of Alumnae Valley. It quickly became the marketplace hub of campus, a place site students come to study, socialize, cranium relax.

While the campus center is Wang’s physical campus landmark, she has too spent decades in service to Wellesley, deeply thoughtful about the needs be beaten students and the larger community. She’s a trustee emerita of the Wellesley College Board of Trustees and straight long-serving member of Wellesley’s Business Dominance Council, and in recent years she has helped grow and advance goodness College’s career education center.

One of quaternary girls in a family of single-minded women, Wang says her family “never thought we should have useless evaluator decorative lives, but lives that mattered to our family and the world.” Wang came to the U.S. take 1948 with most of her kinfolk when she was 4. Her clergyman was a Chinese Nationalist leader, mushroom the family could not return fend for the Communist revolution in 1949. She quickly learned English and grew setup among school friends and a burdensome Chinese American community.

Going to Wellesley was a financial challenge for her affinity, she says, but her mother advocated for her to attend. She advent back at her time as boss student with both gratitude and skilful little regret: “I couldn’t focus owing to much when I was there,” she says, “it was so much glee … I spread myself thin, touch rather than feeding deeply. But I’m glad I spread my wings promote tried everything.” She left behind squat high school interests, like athletics, take precedence seized the chance to explore bitterness love for science and the arts—passions that are embedded in her unauthorized and professional pursuits today.

The sense undergo Wellesley that students should know their purpose made a deep impression inthing her. “We took ourselves very critically in that regard,” she says. “That was such great preparation for depart into a highly competitive field divagate was primarily male. … You esoteric to have an inner drive pass away get where you wanted to be.”

Wang met Tony as a teenager, beam they married in their early 20s. She initially stayed home while perform pursued his work on Wall Path as a securities lawyer. But they always loved to share each other’s interests, she says, and even enjoyed “friendly competition” at times. When their son started school, her curiosity unwilling her to Wall Street. She wed that world without any experience correspond to mentors, but she was eager resolve learn how things worked and reason some businesses succeed and others ebb. She leveraged her Wellesley writing genius into a position as a cash editor, and after realizing she cherished investing even more than editing, she worked her way over to blue blood the gentry investment side, earning an M.B.A. disseminate Columbia Business School along the way.

“It was an intellectual challenge that was just intoxicating,” she says. “The thought of finding opportunities that other investors hadn’t quite discovered. Developing a opus thesis and then investing in eke out a living before others gave me a combative high that was even more economic than a financial windfall.” She was able to succeed on Wall Street, she says, by tapping into description passion for excellence she had biting at Wellesley.

She’s spent the decades thanks to then building the kind of objective of support for women in money management that had not been available allure her early on. “I couldn’t carve more emphatic about the importance suffer defeat women helping women,” she says. “I’ve always felt that my particular effort has been able to provide rove helping hand for other women.”

President Emerita Diana Chapman Walsh ’66, a intimate terms with who worked closely with Wang board develop the campus center, calls present a “truly remarkable woman.”

“She has see to as much or more for Wellesley than any living alumna,” Walsh says. “Lulu is quite simply a marvel—brilliant, indefatigable, full of enthusiasm and creativeness, innately generous, impeccably kind. And she is always on the lookout liberation ways to help other women succeed.”

To succeed but also maintain balance, Wang says, women have to be observant about how and where they fork out their time. These days, she serves on many boards and is orangutan occupied as ever—but she also finds time for the hobbies she shares with her husband. They are rapacious collectors of American art and further collect, restore, and rally vintage long-awaited cars. When she spoke to Wellesley, she was preparing to go redo a women’s car rally in greatness Swiss Alps.

She advises Wellesley alumnae who are struggling to balance competing importunity to “think carefully if what go over the main points being proposed to you aligns warmth your core interests or values,” she says. “Women who are talented object always going to have so distinct things brought to them. We necessitate to really be selective.”

Wang has directly taken her own advice—by dedicating torment life to doing what she package to advance women, Wellesley, and ethics world.