While training at a Boston MMA gym, I was fortunate enough to meet a masters student looking to enter the field of quantitative finance. After he broke down to me the amount of potential quantitative applications in the stock market, I decided this was the field for me and started to explore the field further. Currently designing a reinforcement learning model to minimize volatility given histories of multiple stocks.
In my freshman year of college, I still was very interested in technology and the stock market, but I had not found a way to tie these two interests together. I had always heard of high frequency trading but never delved deep into the field. A friend told me about quantitative finance, and I finally started to learn more.
Coding and markets were at odds in my mind, and I was debating about which field I wanted to enter. Maybe try to work at a developer and then pivot in late career, or maybe start in finance and move to STEM. After talking to some in industry, attending meet-up groups, and taking time to reflect, I settled on a CS degree with a minor in Business.
My senior summer I started to delve deep into AI and began creating algorithms that could model the world to make actionable insights based on the world. I started to learn how to build basic AI models using the TensorFlow documentation along with other online resources.
As I was learning to code, I began to take a fascination with the stock market. My economics teacher in high school introduced me to the stock market and I was very intrigued. After reading How to Make Money in Stocks, I was amazed to see how simple algebra could set one ahead of thousands of investors. I started to obsess over market dynamics and the intricacies of the stock market.
During the Covid lockdowns, I used the extra time to teach myself how to code in Python. I made very basic applications ranging from a simple Space Invader game to data visualization in numpy and matplotlib. The creativity simple scripts enabled entranced me. I wanted to learn to harness that power.
My freshman year I took AB calculus. I had an amazing teacher that broke down the fundamentals of calculus. Throughout this class I solidified my love for math and decided that my career would involve mathematics in some capacity.
