Adam Lemp was already thinking like an investment banker when he deliberated over where to attend college. Having narrowed his choices to the University of South Carolina and another prominent state school, Lemp weighed USC’s scholarship offer and the reputation of the Darla Moore School of Business.
“It was awfully hard to pass up that value proposition,” says Lemp, a Raleigh, North Carolina, native who became a Gamecock in 2012 and never looked back. “I got a top-tier business education and didn’t have any student loans to pay when I graduated.”
But that was only the beginning of the dividends Lemp gained in coming to USC. He joined the hockey club in his first weeks on campus and immediately acquired a great group of friends. He found a larger community of supportive peers in the Moore School and in time would tap into a network of business school alumni, which helped open doors into his dream job — investment banking.
Now based in New York City as director of leveraged finance at Mizuho Americas, a leading corporate and investment bank, Lemp has enjoyed phenomenal success since graduating from USC in 2016. He routinely meets with financial executives around the country in the chemical, building products, metals, and automotive industries and has raised in excess of $100 billion in capital for bank clients since his career began.
“Amongst my peers, I’m probably four or five years younger than most,” he says. “When I first got into this industry at the junior level, it was a lot of work with very tight deadlines. If you don’t have self motivation, you can fizzle out pretty quickly.”
Being self motivated was a trait Lemp leaned into early on. His father was a first-generation college student who earned an engineering degree over time, and Lemp says some of his dad’s resourcefulness is part of his own DNA.
One of the things that I really value about my time at USC was getting opportunities to put my toe in various pools of water and figure out what I actually wanted to do.
With his penchant for math, Lemp focused initially on accounting at USC but realized early on that he wanted something different. He added finance as a second major, inspired a bit by Hollywood movies that dramatized Wall Street wizards.
“I knew I had a hunger. I always thought, ‘Could you imagine being able to work on Wall Street or in the world of high finance?’” he says. “One of the things that I really value about my time at USC was getting opportunities to put my toe in various pools of water and figure out what I actually wanted to do. Looking back on it, that was extremely valuable.”
A personal shake-up helped solidify that evolution from accounting to finance. When Lemp was 19, his father had a heart attack. “It shakes you to your core,” he says. And it made him realize that he didn’t want to play it safe in accounting — he wanted to pursue the dream of an investment banking career.
He landed an internship at the Federal Home Loan Bank in Atlanta and kept busy doing odd jobs to earn money for school. Along the way, he began reaching out to Moore School alumni in the investment banking world — cold calling as a way to get his foot in the door.
“I reached out to hundreds of people,” he says. “I knew I had to do something to stand out.”
Eventually he reached out to Bill Ginn, ’69 BA, ’72 MBA, who was winding down a long career in that field. Ginn gave him a chance, and that connection helped Lemp land his first entry-level job after graduation, working for Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.
Looking back on his time at Carolina, Lemp says, “It was the perfect place to be who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do — to build that core value belief system. You don’t necessarily have that viewpoint when you’re 18 or 19 and trying to figure stuff out, but I know now that it gave me the opportunity to explore what I wanted to be and what I wanted to do, professionally and personally."