Feliz hopes to mix international business and law

One of the reasons Ray Feliz has been so successful at Cornell College is that when he decides to do something, he commits completely.

During the fall Feliz, who has worked with Associate Athletics Director Dick Simmons for four years, was announcing a soccer game when he talked with the assistant coach about the team’s need for more players. The coach invited him to practice with the team. Not long after, Feliz was playing soccer and  even started a game. He didn’t have much soccer experience; he’d been a wrestler for seven years, and wrestled for his first two years at Cornell.

“That’s just my work ethic,” Feliz said. “I’m an all or nothing kind of individual.”

That commitment will serve Feliz well when the economics and business major enters law school at the University of Wisconsin in the fall. Once on campus, he plans to apply to earn his MBA at the same time he earns his law degree, and he plans to focus on international business law. His inspiration was an eight-and-a-half-month internship during his sophomore year with Principal Financial Group in Des Moines.

Diego Verdugo ’12, who is part of the company’s prestigious Leadership Development Program, was a mentor to Feliz and recommended he seek out an internship with Principal. Feliz worked with global investments and found he liked working with businesses around the world.

“I got a chance to talk with people from different countries and different cultures,” he said. “It was great to get a feel for how business is done differently around the world.”

In addition to wanting to work with international businesses, Feliz hopes to have a pro-bono side practice focused on immigration law. His family immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic when he was young, and he’s seen how expensive and confusing the legal process around immigration can be. He wants to help those who might not otherwise be able to afford it navigate the system. Feliz helped his father start Dominicans in Virginia, a group that helps Dominican immigrants in the state with issues such as voting in their native country while living in the United States.

Feliz still has family in the Dominican Republic and hopes one day to return and enter politics in the country.

His time at Cornell has been deeply influenced by faculty in the economics and business department. Professor Santhi Heejebu is his advisor and wrote a letter of recommendation  for his law school application.

Professor Todd Knoop’s Introduction to Macroeconomics course was among the most important courses he took, he said.

“It set the standard for the level of difficulty and rigor that I could expect at Cornell,” he said, “and showed me how hard I’d have to work to succeed.”

A course on women in the labor force with Professor Jerry Savitsky also shaped his experience. It explored the wage gap between men and women, and looked at what could be explained by differences in experience and education and what could not.

“That opened my eyes to these issues,” he said. “It’s something I’d really like to help address.”

Even his co-curricular activities had an economic focus. Feliz joined Enactus, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring students to improve the world through entrepreneurial action, during his junior year. Working with other members of the group, Feliz created a program designed to keep school children from buying sugar-filled snacks that ended up being so successful that the group made it to the quarterfinals in the national Enactus competition this past spring.

Feliz served as the group’s president this year, and although he’s proud of what he was able to accomplish, he’s even more proud of the fact that four of the five people he originally recruited to help with his project have stayed with the group and are taking over leadership positions for next year.

“We’ve made some big strides,” he said. “I learned a lot about leadership and worked with some amazing people.”

Feliz’s experience with Enactus, with soccer and wrestling, and with his coursework all helped to prepare him for admission to law school at the University of Wisconsin, which he chose because it’s both a top-tier program and  has a highly-regarded focus on international law.

“I’m really excited for what the future holds,” he said.