John Chen
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What he does:
- John works in a large international company that specializes in trading and processing raw commodities. His job as a Rick Analyst is to look at the company's operations as a whole and make sure that they are not taking up too risky of investments, given market price movements, increase in the company's positions, volatile markets, etc. Everyday he produces the VAR (Value at Risk) report that tells traders from around the world what their maximum losses will be given a certain confidence interval. In addition, there are a lot of other ad-hoc processes that he does on a daily basis.
Math on the job:
- Statistics if very for important in John's job, such as understanding confidence intervals, regression, correlations, etc. In addition, he uses a monte carlo method to generate a report, so having taken Math 381 was extremely helpful.
Student's background:
- John has a Bachelor of Science in ACMS from the University of Washington, Spring, 2008.
- He says he was very quantitative and stuck with math, but was more interested in the markets. That is what got him interested in economics and finance.
Advice for students:
- It depends on your own interests, but diversify the classes you take. If you are looking into getting into finance, take some finance and economics classes. If you want to get a job after college, make sure you start looking long before you graduate and send out alot of applications.