Alumni / Class of 2023
Vera Lai Wei graduated Summa Cum Laude from CUNY Baruch College with a bachelor’s degree in Finance and a minor in Mathematics in June 2021. Her multidisciplinary coursework in math, programming, and finance enabled her to establish a basic understanding of these topics. And Vera yearned to apply her theoretical knowledge into practice. Therefore, except for being a teaching assistant, she took several internships in different types of companies like investment banks, asset management companies, securities firms, commercial banks, and start-ups since undergraduate study.
Vera’s passion in data science and programming was ignited when she became a business analyst intern at a fintech company, where she realized the appeal of data and the potential of information technology to solve problems in finance and started to use quantitative methods to improve efficiency in her daily work. After graduating with the Beta Gamma Sigma honor from Baruch, Vera worked as a data scientist intern at China International Capital Corporation Ltd., where she established the database of products, created reports using Python, visualized the return data in Tableau, and tracked the latest performance of products in SQL and identified anomalies. At the same time, Vera also did some work to assist in making investment strategies, for example conducting Brinson Attribution Analysis to reflect portfolio managers' investment styles.
More recently, Vera worked as a quantitative researcher at CCB Principal Asset Management Co., Ltd, building models to predict fund positions, monitoring position changes, ranking mutual funds with Python, and developing trading strategies. Vera also adopted Principal Component Regression and Lasso Regression into her model to make predictions. During her work, Vera realized creating value through models is exactly the beauty of information technology.
As a candidate of the MSIT program at Northwestern University, Vera is thrilled to accumulate expertise in the information technology area by working through personalized curriculum and practicums. She is looking forward to more opportunities to solve practical problems with her interdisciplinary skills and she is willing to embrace all possibilities in her future career path.
