{"id":3,"date":"2022-09-27T04:48:36","date_gmt":"2022-09-27T04:48:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dkadventures\/?p=3"},"modified":"2022-09-27T04:48:36","modified_gmt":"2022-09-27T04:48:36","slug":"the-journey-from-spreadsheets-to-sofware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dkadventures\/2022\/09\/27\/the-journey-from-spreadsheets-to-sofware\/","title":{"rendered":"The journey from Spreadsheets to Sofware"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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When I started my first job at an investment bank in South Korea, the advanced technical tool that I knew how to use was Microsoft Excel. You can imagine how technically savvy I was at that point. I was a new hire straight from undergraduate studies in mathematics and economics. Excited about becoming a trader, I was ready to tackle any challenges that came my way. With a turn of events from the power that be, a few of my analyst classmates somehow ended up in a rotation program in financial engineering. None of us had Ph. D’s in a STEM field. We all wanted to be traders. As a result, being a quant was not on our list of things to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Little did we know that we would be asked to make code in VBA and test code written in Python, C++, and Java. You can imagine how much I struggled. It was like throwing someone who does not know how to swim into shark-infested waters. Maybe it was the intention of the leaders to make one of us cracked and quit. However, instead of hating having to understand code, I began to respect the developers who worked beside me. I wanted to learn more from my peers and them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Besides the mathematical wizards with PhDs, the talented developers on the team, who translated the theoretical financial derivative models into readable lines of a program, could sift through hundreds and maybe thousands of lines of code and produce working tools and models within a few days. It was an inspiring sight to see. Instead of being distraught and discouraged at what I had to learn, I wanted to learn more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Just so I could begin to understand code quickly, I went through Freecodecamp, Codecademy, Dataquest, Datacamp, and many Udemy courses. However, like many of my peers in Oregon State University’s Post-Bachelors program, self-learning could only take me so far. I knew that I lacked the fundamental building blocks in computer science. I had no idea what memory management was, nor did I understand what an algorithm did. Becoming a software engineer on my own was not only challenging but time-consuming. It was only years after this experience in financial engineering that I found OSU’s post-bachelor degree program in computer science. It was a long road of learning and working full-time, but that spark that I obtained working in financial engineering never faded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was the best experience that I could have had. I learned to appreciate developers by briefly working next to them. Though I ended up being in a different department, as did my colleagues, the months I spent with quants were invaluable. If I hadn’t been oddly transferred to financial engineering, I wouldn’t have been here writing this blog post on my final course in the program. At some point in the future, I probably would have desired to become a software engineer regardless of what work experience I had, but that timing would most likely have come later rather than sooner. I always thought being a software engineer was a farfetched idea that was too technical. Yet, here I am. I went from being an economics and mathematics student who never touched code to a student working on a capstone project for his computer science degree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m sure many or all of you can relate to the journey of enrolling at OSU and finally being on the last course in the program. It has been a long journey that took years to get here. Here are the words I have for you all. “It is only the beginning of our journey!”<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When I started my first job at an investment bank in South Korea, the advanced technical tool that I knew how to use was Microsoft Excel. You can imagine how technically savvy I was at that point. I was a new hire straight from undergraduate studies in mathematics and economics. Excited about becoming a trader, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12821,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dkadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dkadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dkadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dkadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12821"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dkadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dkadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dkadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions\/8"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dkadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dkadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dkadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}