Alumni Council Chair Found Niche In Finance
Melissa Love-Greenfield didn’t have a job lined up when she graduated from Auburn in 1988 and soon learned there were few opportunities for young women with a finance degree.
Her father was a Marine and the family moved often as she grew up. He chose to retire in Tallahassee, Florida, working with a business that set up computer configurations for other companies. He was from Alabama and had a degree from Auburn, so Melissa checked out the school because it was close to home. She immediately fell in love with the iconic brick buildings, friendly people and the academic offerings.
She found her niche in finance. After graduation, she went back to Tallahassee and worked for a small, family-owned firm doing their accounts receivable and running their computers. She wanted more of a challenge. A friend of her father suggested she try to get on with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which offered plenty of challenges. An independent department of the U.S. Treasury, it charters, regulates and supervises all federal banks, federal savings associations and federal agencies and branches of foreign banks.
She joined the OCC in 1989 in an entry-level job as a field examiner. She traveled from bank to bank administering supervisory examinations of community banks. She gravitated toward oversight of the use of developing technology.
She went back in the field, visiting the largest institutions the OCC supervises. She joined the lead expert team, a group of subject-matter experts. She rose to Associate Deputy Comptroller, where she now oversees the lead experts.
Love-Greenfield will soon become chair of the Harbert College Alumni Council.
“I was incredibly honored,” she said. “It’s a group I’ve been engaged with for several years. I have a lot of love for Auburn and want to do all I can to support Harbert College of Business and the student body.”
She finds interacting with students “energizing.” She enjoys the Tiger Cage competitions, in which groups of students make a case for a business idea and compete for sed money.
She hopes to see the Council and the college continue to make necessary changes to keep its graduates relevant in the fast-changing business world.
“We have alums who are well-positioned to come to campus and talk about what is going on in business, and the faculty can also make some adjustments and suggest how to change the curriculum to help students,” she said.
