NYU, part 1 of 5
From mathematics to business
I stopped seeing mathematics as the destination and started seeing it as a language.
Context
I started at NYU in fall 2023 in the College of Arts and Science, studying Math and Computer Science. I chose NYU partly for a practical reason: I wanted to live in a city where I could keep working while I studied.
The problem
I loved math. But KASA had left me with questions math alone wasn’t answering. How does a company decide what to do? How does it allocate capital? How does it grow?
What I did
Changing schools
Two things changed my direction. The first was noticing how differently the UK and the US see business degrees. The second was meeting people in New York who had built careers and companies. Talking to them made it obvious that my real interest was business.
So I went through NYU’s competitive internal transfer and moved to the Stern School of Business. I now study Finance, Statistics and Mathematics there.
- Fall 2023College of Arts and ScienceMath and Computer Science
- ThenTransferred to the Stern School of BusinessFinance, Statistics and Mathematics
- LaterAdded a minor in Film Production
Keeping the math
I didn’t leave the math behind. It just changed jobs.
| Where | What the math was |
|---|---|
| Structured finance | The order in which a pool of loans pays its investors |
| A search fund | The three-statement model behind whether a company was worth buying |
| A food startup | A pricing ladder where a four-pack had quietly become cheaper per unit than a ten-pack |
When checking becomes the problem
In NYU’s Mathematical Finance Group, I worked on a team building a crypto model. I tended to re-verify every small change to the algorithm, sometimes several times. To me that was quality control. To my teammates, it was why deadlines kept slipping, and it caused some friction.
So I changed how I checked. I set fixed times for review instead of checking constantly, separated the changes that were critical from the ones that weren’t, and explained more often why I was checking what I checked.
A club with no budget
I also joined the Korean Honors Business Society, and later became its vice president for marketing and alumni relations. When the club was facing a year with more fixed costs than money, I secured venue and food sponsors that removed about $3,000 of event costs. I also rebuilt our outreach and ran alumni events twice a year, with more than 120 people attending. Membership grew by about 30%, and once we reworked how the team prepared, prep time fell by roughly half.
What I learned
I stopped seeing mathematics as the destination and started seeing it as a language. Most of the interesting problems I’ve worked on since were written in it. None of them were about it.
And being careful has a cost too. High standards become a weakness when the improvement they buy is smaller than the delay they cause.