“When you get to college and in real life, where you really add value is having differentiated thoughts. There are many different solutions to a problem, and you can’t be afraid to have an opinion, even if that means being wrong sometimes. The real world is open-ended, and Athenian prepares you for that.”
Emily started making the daily 75 mile trek from Modesto to Athenian in 8th grade alongside her younger brother who simultaneously started in 6th. She credits her parents for finding Athenian as they were looking for a school that would challenge them academically. For their family, Athenian offered the right amount of challenge while also being a philosophical match.
During her five years at Athenian, Emily dabbled in just about everything – something she encourages today’s students to do. “You never know what you’ll find interesting," she said. She ran track and cross country, something she admittedly joined to avoid taking PE. She recently returned to running for health, connection and stress relief, and credits her high school experience for helping her to discover the sport.
Robotics however, was Emily’s main passion in high school. “I always loved to build things,” she explained. She was the captain of the Robotics Team and by the time she applied to college, was certain she wanted to major in mechanical engineering. She ended up at Columbia where she quickly noticed that her mechanical engineering major peers were gearing up for careers in the automotive industry or preparing to pursue an advanced degree–neither of which appealed to her. Serendipitously, as Emily was questioning her major, she enrolled in a computer science class–a graduation requirement at Columbia. “I thought I had zero interest in computer science, but immediately loved it,” she said. Adding, “computer science has become like a general liberal arts degree but for STEM.”
Once realizing that computer science would prepare her for a variety of careers, including consulting and finance, she made the switch. She had always loved puzzles and problem-solving, and computer science was just that. “In a class you’d be given a problem with a number of possible solutions…I loved that every line of code was like a unique signature, like the way you would write an essay and I would write an essay are different” she explained. “Any job you might end up in has an element of that kind of creative problem solving.”
Now, three years out of college, Emily works in finance for Bank of America where she does equity derivatives sales trading. She explained, “equity derivative products are essentially financial instruments whose values are derived from movements in an underlying stock/etf--its calculus in real life.” Much of Emily’s day-to-day is spent working with institutional clients to help find the right solutions to meet their equity exposure goals and she uses math daily in pricing these structures.
Thinking back to her classes at Athenian, Emily is grateful for the teachers' approach, noting, “their way of teaching you to think is exactly what you need for applied math,” which was instrumental in studying computer science and now in her job. “In class, you were sometimes given exceptionally difficult problems that you might not be able to solve, but that allowed you to show what and how you were thinking, and that is what the teachers were most interested in.”
Though naturally drawn to STEM, Emily also credits her Athenian history and literature seminars with encouraging “free-thinking” and problem-solving. She noted, “When you get to college and in real life, where you really add value is having differentiated thoughts. There are many different solutions to a problem and you can’t be afraid to have an opinion, even if that means being wrong sometimes. The real world is open-ended, and Athenian prepares you for that.”
