The Quantitative Finance Club (QFC) organized a Chicago Trek for the Masters in Finance Quantitative track students to visit three financial firms–Discover Financial Services, Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, and Markit–on October 29. The visit provided a great opportunity for the students to learn about the different financial careers and network with industry experts and alumni.
Guest Blogger: Hariharan Pappil Kothandapani, QFC, VP of Communications
We started off early in the morning, for a visit to Discover Financial Services. Here we learned about the different roles, responsibilities, and skills that are required for a career in risk management. We also got an opportunity to interact with some of our alumni: Xuejing (Vita) Wu (MSFQ 2014), who was working with the Corporate Risk Management division, and Sheng Zhu (MSF 2011), who shared her experience of working for the Loss Forecasting team at Discover.
After that we visited the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago. We beganvwith an awesome lunch with an amazing view from the 90th floor of the AON Center which is the 3rd tallest building in Chicago. Here we got an opportunity to interact and have lunch with the top management of FHLB. The list of speakers included:
Matt Zimmerman, Vice President, Credit Risk Management
Mike Zeifert, Vice President, Credit Risk Management
Amy Shi, Vice President, Market Risk Management
Patrick Sullivan, Vice President, MPF Mortgage Analytics
Steve Thomas, Senior Vice President, Mortgage Capital Markets
Ashish Tripathy, Senior Vice President, Member Strategy & Solutions
Then we 
had to take a long drive to reach our next destination – Markit. Here we learned about the firm’s recent developments in trading strategies based on social media like Twitter and other Quantitative Research. The speakers here included:
Chris Hammond, Director, Research Signals
Kevin Rice, Assistant Vice President, Research Signals
Linan Bi (MSFQ 2014), Associate, Research Signals
Vivian Yan, Vice President, TCA
Finally, we ended the long, exciting, and eventful day with an alumni dinner, socializing and sharing lighter moments.
