What degree did you study at university?
BSc Computational and Applied Mathematics (Wits), BSc (Hon) Mathematics (Wits)
What is your role at Nedbank?
Quantitative Analyst
Can you tell us why you chose this career?
I got to learn about Quantitative analysis when I was at university while exploring model building techniques. I liked the whole idea of model building, being able to take something that might be complex in nature, apply some techniques to it, and outputting a likely future prediction. What I also liked about this career is the fact that it blends programing and finance skills, these are skills are consider as being the greatest in this time and age.
What’s a typical day like in your job?
I mostly start my day with reading my emails and addressing any other requests from the previous day that I might have not addressed. Most of the work I do is project based, so I mostly set my own daily goals in line with the project’s timeline and depending on the project I can either be performing analysis on data, validating a model or implementing changes to a model.
What are the some of the highlights and challenges of your role?
I think major highlights are how fast things move in the world of work. I’ve managed to learn about five programming languages in a short space of time. Surprisingly learning a new language wasn’t a huge challenge in the projects I’ve worked on, data cleaning takes the top position.
How do you keep up to date with all the changes in your profession?
We have knowledge share seminars were individuals share their ideas, techniques and what is happening in the financial services industry. These seminars equip one to best prepare for changes ahead. Other than seminars I do my own research on what others are doing in my field of work.
What do you enjoy doing for fun outside of the office?
Outside the office I enjoy spending time with friends and family, and I am teaching myself how to produce music