Emma Cunningham: Career Built in Community

Early on, Emma Cunningham thought success meant fitting a certain mold — being more practical, more precise, more certain of the path ahead. Over time, she’s learned the opposite is true.

Cunningham is a Vice President in Family Office Resources where she serves as liaison between third-party lifestyle providers, Financial Advisors and the Firm’s wealthiest and most complex clients. Through a curated platform of offerings, she helps connect clients with solutions to enhance and simplify their day-to-day lives.   She was named a Rising Star in the Morgan Stanley MAKERS Class of 2026, an honor that recognizes employees who are earlier in their careers but already making a meaningful impact. For her, the recognition was exciting, while also a genuine surprise.

Unconventional Beginnings

Growing up, Cunningham competed in Irish step dancing. At times, she wondered whether she should give it up and do something more typical. Play soccer, maybe. Blend in more. Instead, it became a defining part of her childhood, one of the first signs choosing something different could be an advantage.

A similar tension resurfaced in college. Cunningham studied English at Barnard College, a women’s college in New York City. It was a formative experience — not just academically, but personally. Barnard gave her confidence. It was a place where women were not afraid to step outside their comfort zones, and where she learned to trust herself. Still, majoring in English did not always feel like the practical choice. She loved the work, loved the reading, loved the professors, but like many humanities students, she also knew graduation would bring a looming question: What next?

Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover

Needless to say, finance was not the obvious answer. Cunningham describes herself as a “words person,” not a numbers person. But, when she began thinking less about job titles and more about the kind of work she actually enjoyed, the picture shifted. She liked solving problems, connecting people, building community. In college, she gravitated toward the kinds of roles that brought people together, whether that meant organizing events or simply helping create a sense of belonging.

What eventually drew her toward wealth management was the realization that the work was more relationship-driven than she realized. It required strategy, yes, but also empathy, communication and creativity.

Cunningham recalls working at a publishing internship when she landed her first interview at Morgan Stanley. She reached out to someone at the Firm, not really expecting a response but hoping for some advice all the same. Instead, the woman she had reached out to responded straight away and offered to get on a call. Still at her internship at the publishing house, Cunningham took the call from a bathroom stall, with automatic toilets flushing in the background, trying to keep her nerves under control while talking through potential interview questions. The advice she got was simple and lasting: If you don’t know the answer, don’t panic. Explain how you would approach the problem. Think through it. Show how you learn.

Suddenly Cunningham was able to think about financial markets like stories — something to analyze, interpret and make sense of. It gave her confidence.

Entering the Fold

That conversation stayed with her. Even so, Cunningham remembers how intimidating it was entering Morgan Stanley — how, early on, she assumed someone would eventually “figure out” she didn’t belong. She never studied finance. She didn’t speak the lingo. She was entering a world that, from the outside, seemed filled with people who had always known how to navigate it.

Craig, her first manager during her internship, helped shift her thinking about what a career at Morgan Stanley could be. She saw how generous people were with their time and resources and, suddenly, what had initially seemed so foreign felt like somewhere she could belong.

Later came other managers and mentors who helped deepen that belief. Time and again, Cunningham found herself surrounded by people willing to invest in her, recognizing her potential before she could see it in herself.

That support mattered because the imposter syndrome was real. But so was the evidence against it. There were the technical exams she had to take early in her analyst years, when she realized even finance majors still had a lot to learn. In Morgan Stanley’s rotational analyst program, every new assignment forced her to learn something unfamiliar. Over time, it became clear there were always things to figure out, with people around willing to help you do just that.

“I have learned that when I’m in an environment where I can really be myself, that’s the right environment for me,” Cunningham says.

Now she tries to create that feeling for others.

Paying It Forward

Cunningham spends significant time on Barnard’s campus recruiting and talking with students who remind her of herself — bright, capable and not entirely convinced they belong. She knows how much one encouraging conversation can give someone confidence and change the course of their professional journey, because it changed hers. She knows, too, that plenty of people arrive with doubts that have nothing to do with talent and everything to do with whether they can picture themselves in the room.

“To the extent that I can, I want to be that relatable person for someone and say, trust me, I’ve been there,” she says

To that end, Cunningham has been a leader in Women in Wealth, an employee-run group dedicated to supporting, advancing, and celebrating women at Morgan Stanley and the Enable networks, which are Morgan Stanley’s employee networks focused on disability inclusion, accessibility, neurodiversity, caregivers, advocacy, and community building — part of Cunningham’s distinct efforts to encourage and elevate other people.

It’s been six years since Cunningham joined the Firm out of college. And, over those years, her reflex was to say yes to everything. Every project, every committee, every chance to help. Recently, she has been thinking more carefully about what it means to be intentional instead. As her responsibilities grow, so does her sense that leadership is not about being everywhere at once. It’s about knowing where you can make the greatest difference — and where you can open a door for someone else.

That makes this Rising Star recognition feel especially fitting. Cunningham isn’t just building a career. She’s building the kind of culture that made her own path possible in the first place. For someone who once wondered whether she was too untraditional or too unlikely for this world of finance, that may be the clearest measure of how far she’s already come.