What advice would you offer prospective candidates on
transitioning from school to the workplace?
First, don’t be afraid to ask for help. No one wants you to
waste lots of time figuring out how to do something. Second, take
ownership of you projects. Once a manager makes you responsible for
a project make sure it gets done –stay late and get help if needed.
Lastly, try to help everyone who asks for it.
What about your career excites you
the most—gets you out of bed in the morning?
The challenge of solving problems is what gets
me out of bed. I enjoy improving a model so that it accounts for
changing market conditions or finding a way of connecting two sets
of data to help explain why the market is acting the way it
is.
How would you describe your team and the people you work
with?
The people around me are smart and patient. I
knew very little about the market when I came and everyone
patiently taught me what I needed to learn.
How do you apply your degree to what you’re doing
now?
Having studied computational finance and
physics I can understand the sophisticated mathematics underlying
some of the models as well as the intuition behind choosing one
model over another.
What skills have you found to be the most useful in your
position?
My position involves analyzing market data and
distilling that information into a few key points or graphs.
I rely on my experience as an experimental physicist when I
collected data and decided how to fit it to existing models. In
both cases, it’s important to think through how to present the data
and your interpretation in the simplest and clearest way possible.
This is especially true when presenting to traders or managers who
are busy.
Describe your experience in your specific training
program.
It was wonderful. I met associates from all
over the world, attended speeches given by Citi senior managers,
and learned about the various products in Global Capital Markets
which was crucial since I had no market experience.
How did your summer internship help you
make the decision to pursue a career at Citi?
Once I experienced Citi’s collegial attitude
and how open the managers were to new ideas I knew this was the
place for me. During my internship my main task was to implement a
pricing model and my suggestions for improvements were well
received once I proved I understood the model.
What do you enjoy doing outside of work?
I enjoy the weekend in NYC with my family. One
of the Citi perks is free admission to the major cultural
institutions in the city.