Running Into Quant

Name: Victor Cai

Age: 26

Graduation Year: 2015

Occupation: Quantitative Researcher at JP Morgan Chase & Co. 

Victor Cai (‘15) attended Stuyvesant from 2011 to 2015. During his time at Stuyvesant, Cai was an active member of the track and field team. After graduating, he went on to receive a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) and a master’s in financial mathematics from Columbia University. He currently works as a quantitative research analyst at JP Morgan Chase & Co.

1. What was your experience like attending Stuyvesant, and how did your time there influence your future experiences?

I was surrounded by really smart people. […] I met a lot of really good friends, and I learned a lot of the fundamental math and statistics that help me in my career to this day. It’s a math and science school, right? I knew I was kind of good at math because I got good grades in math and built a good foundation. In college, I had to take calc[ulus], and it was really easy. I thought I would be average, but I was actually at the [top] of the curve. [Stuyvesant] made me prepared for those math and science classes. Also, in my career, when I tell people that I went to Stuyvesant, everyone knows about it. I’m a little surprised by that; they know that Stuyvesant is a really good school and that it’s really hard to get into. They see me as a more suitable candidate just because I went here.

1. What clubs/extracurricular activities did you participate in at Stuyvesant? Do you still participate in them after high school or keep in touch with your old high school friends?

I was on the track and field team. I wasn’t that good, honestly, but it kept me healthy because I had to run a few miles every day along the Hudson River. It trained my mentality because in running, your body gets so tired, and your mind is telling you to give up, but you have to keep on going. I’ve met some of my good friends from these people on the team and running with them, joking around with them, and going to races with them. In the hours that we spent lining up, signing up, and waiting for your race, we built a camaraderie. [...] There are some people I still talk to, but sometimes, when you go to college, you kind of drift off. I would say I still have a few friends that I still talk to to this day.

1. What was the college application process like for you? Did you always know what you wanted to be in the future?

[USC] was my top choice. My parents didn’t know about the American education system, so I had to go through the process myself. It was pretty straightforward, though. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to major in, but I knew I really liked math and science subjects like chemistry and biology. My dad suggested that I go into chemistry because that’s what his background is in. But two years into it, I realized I liked finance, like following the markets [and] trading stocks. I always knew I wanted to switch, so since I was already two years into the degree, I worked for a little bit in engineering just to try it out. [...] I didn’t like it, so I went to get a master’s from Columbia in the intersection of finance and mathematics, which synergized with my background. As an engineering major [in USC], we did not have that many programming courses, and I had to learn computer science on my own through online courses, YouTube, etc. I just had to learn more programming and math that I could apply to finance. [...] Finance jobs don’t actually ask you to major in finance or economics. They don’t care; as long as you have a technical background, you can major in anything.

1. What do you do in your current career?

I’m a quantitative researcher, so I use a lot of math and statistics to build models. You need to know some finance—what the numbers mean—because sometimes, the models spit out a number, and if you don’t have the finance knowledge, you would just take the number as it is, and it wouldn’t make sense in the context. I also do a lot of programming. I build analytic tools to summarize results and visualize data for people on other teams who don’t have the background to understand the numbers and trends. It’s really STEM-heavy, and it’s what Stuyvesant [prepared] me for.

1. What advice would you give to a current Stuyvesant student?

Stuy is a really good school with a lot of good opportunities. I wish I had taken more advantage of the clubs. Now that I’m a quant and I know what gives you a leg up in these jobs, I would’ve tried to do math team. That would give an edge since problem-solving is really important in interviewing. In quant interviews, they basically ask you math team problems. In college, I didn’t really pursue those because I didn’t know I would want to be a quant, but if I knew then what I know now about how to be a more qualified candidate, I would have pursued more math-y clubs. […] I would advise students to participate more in their clubs because you only have high school once.