As any young person when asked the unavoidable question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, I thought of jobs I had seen before and made an impression on me. I was in Fourth Grade when I declared my first ever dream career. I had traveled a few times to China to visit my family there and so I longed to be on that plane to take me to a happy place again. But what do you know when you’re that young? Over the years it gradually changed to being a doctor, biological engineer, and project manager. However, once I really thought about it, got some experience interning, volunteering, and working near those jobs, I found myself second guessing my career path. The more I explored those career paths, the more details I found that didn’t really turn me on.
For a year, during my sophomore year of college, I was lost. Anchored down by an obligation to stay with the college due to a sizeable scholarship I received and not really feeling the degree I was currently pursuing, I had to make sure I really wanted to commit to something else to avoid making a choice I could potentially regret. Seeking professional insight and answers, I networked with numerable people from different backgrounds to find a career that would interest me. I knew financial stability was important to me so I added on a Bachelor in Business Administration with Shidler in Finance at the beginning of the year, but it wasn’t enough, I needed something that would make me indispensable. Knowing nothing else but the fact that it was important to me to be able to have the choice to be flexible to do anything I could ever want to do, whenever I want, wherever I want, and the slight interest to explore programming again, I religiously kept going to different networking events and talks. I was lucky to have eventually met a mentor that was willing to put their trust in me and encourage me to try giving computer science a try. To help me see his vision, he brought me all the way to San Francisco, where he was currently living, and hooked me up with a tech startup to open my eyes to this world and the limitless possibilities there could be.
The tech startup culture in Silicon Valley is definitely harsh, and I learned really quick that I wouldn’t be able to sustainably work in such a fast-paced and thick-skinned environment forever, but I got to see software engineering happening right beside to me. During my stint there, I saw how flexible computer science was and how crucial it is to these companies. There is a whole world out there and such a demand for people with programming skills. Although being a front-end or back-end software engineer may not be my thing, I definitely felt like I was going in the right direction. Coming back for classes the next semester, taking both Finance and Computer Science courses, ironically and fortunately taking an investments class during that time, I realized that my goals of finding a lucrative career and job security could actualize itself in the form of working in the financial sector as a data scientist or quantitative analyst. My first project I’d like to tackle with this new interest is developing good models to give me predictions about the direction of the stock using historical data, back-testing it, and then running these in real time to see how successful it is. My next project would be to develop a program to generate signals in the stock market with big pay-offs. With these experiences, I hope to either be able to consistently accumulate wealth and continue working for myself or use these experiences and skills to contribute to a larger company that can further develop my skills to eventually work for myself. Hopefully this will all workout, and if not, I have my computer science and finance skills along with me for the ride.