“A lot of times, in finance, people tell you what you can’t do.
“It’s not just that he’s smart and works hard, it’s that he has a very positive, can-do attitude, which I think is important on Wall Street,” Dr. He’s had Mazaika as a student in several graduate courses and also hired him as a teaching assistant. Jonathan Kaufman, an experienced hand on Wall Street who’s worked as a managing director at Salomon Brothers and now runs his own fund. The course really encourages self sufficiency while challenging you to excel beyond a typical class project.” 'A very positive, can-do attitude'
#MAZAIKA USE IMAGE ONE TIME CODE#
“And the tools we use at SMIF were similar to the code management systems at NASA. “Because of the skills I got working directly with servers at NASA, I was able to set up a better framework at SMIF that improved how we stored and accessed data,” he said. The yearlong program challenges students to use quantitative methods in managing a portion of the university’s endowment Mazaika ran the quant investment solutions side of the fund during his second semester in SMIF, where he drew upon his NASA work in solving data and workflow problems at the fund. Of the courses he’s taken at Stevens, it was his time with the Student Managed Investment Fund that most appealed to him. He calls Virginia home now, but Mazaika said the Quantitative Finance program at Stevens enticed him to return to New Jersey. A military brat - his father spent 20 years as an Air Force pilot - Mazaika bounced between New Jersey, Idaho and Virginia during his childhood. That journey has been a sort of homecoming for Mazaika. But yeah, it’s been kind of a weird journey, from weather data and computer science to finance.” “You’ve got billionaire clients coming to your office, you’re moving global markets, and you’re creating and designing your own solutions to problems that are brand new. “I really like the day-to-day pace of what’s going on, what’s changing, where markets are heading,” he said. You might think someone with NASA on his résumé would be a better fit in a science program, but what really excites Mazaika is the thrill of the markets. “It’s a programming problem as well as a data problem - you’re not only housing the data, you’re creating tools so you can easily package the right data and share it with scientists studying weather or climate.” Day-to-day market excitement “What they do is maintain these petabytes of data - everything from CO 2 levels, temperatures, radiation - from satellites that have been in orbit for 20, maybe 30 years,” he said.
He worked in the Langley Research Center’s atmospheric science data center, which stores the satellite-generated data that’s constantly raining down to Earth. Mazaika wasn’t actually a rocket scientist at NASA. “I see a real need for financial innovation, and I think Stevens has prepared me to meet that challenge.” “There’s so much innovation in finance right now - you hear about things like machine learning and it just gets me thinking about how that can be applied to something practical in the industry,” he said. His ability to use technology and data in framing and solving problems is a product of his Stevens coursework, his varied internships and his natural curiosity, which have put him in elite company as a Neupauer scholar - Stevens' most prestigious academic honor.
0 kommentar(er)
