Why did you choose to pursue your undergraduate education with NUS Mathematics?
I wanted something technical, challenging and that could satisfy my intellectual curiosities. I wasn’t sure exactly what course I wanted, so I decided to do Math, which could branch off to everything else, then learn anything else later if I wanted to! Part of it was because I also wanted to be in finance and believed a foundation in Math would give me the competencies and confidence to tackle hard problems in the workplace.
What motivated you to do a Minor(or 2!!)? Is this because you would like to pursue a specific career pathway, discover your interests etc?
I did a Minor in Business so that I could learn more about finance from a business student’s point of view, purely knowing the technical is not enough, I thought, in the workplace I’m not just working with technical people, I’ll probably have to work with non-technical people as well!
The Minor in Statistics was just out of convenience! I just thought hey Im doing a bunch of stats courses already, I enjoy it, why not just do 2 more and get a minor!
How did the opportunities provided by NUS enhance your personal growth and development, academic growth / learning and career aspirations?
Internships
- Applied Science Technological Research Institute of Hong Kong
I did very software engineering and data science related work and I realised those were not what I wanted after my time here! I still loved programming and coding, but my interests were headed more towards statistical analysis and automation.
- Quantedge Capital
Working in risk and operations! Financial risk is a big topic we focused alot on in many of my courses, so i found it relevant, margin calls, options, future etc. This internship was one of the best! Theres so much more I could share about this.
Internship is where theory meets application! Alot of the things we learn in school may not directly be used but the competence of wrestling with hard and challenging problems will always stay!
Student Exchange Programme (SEP)
- Winter School – Yonsei University South Korea
I took Game Theory! It was an extremely enjoyable and fun module! This SEP allowed me to do a lot of travelling and self reflection, I spent ALOT of time alone and that is where I did deep introspection about my own soul!
FYP
My FYP was not as heavy as I expected it to be, I thought I would be pulling all nighters but I really enjoyed just searching out papers and trying to understand them! Time to put my Math foundations and knowledge to good use! There were many things that I knew that helped me in comprehending the mathematical language used in the paper! Reading about real applications were interesting as well! My topic was in hypergraphs and the applications included computational chemistry and neural networks in data science as well!
What advice would you offer to fellow students who are keen on choosing NUS Mathematics for their undergraduate education?
Galileo Galilei says, ‘Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.’ and I add on to say then ‘Mathematics did not happen by chance, just as our universe, there must be a grand writer’.