SWE - Fall 2007 - (Page 52) In recent years, the financial engineering students at the joint Drucker School and School of Mathematical Science Financial Engineering program at the Claremont Graduate University included: • A bond trader from Singapore • An astro physicist from the United States Air Force • A mathematics teacher • An accelerated economics student • A modeling analyst from Boeing • A recent economics graduate • An executive manager with a Ph.D. in chemistry mer CEO of Tribeca Global Management LLC, Beder, who was also chairperson of the International Association of Financial Engineers for many years and is now co-chairperson of its Investor Risk Committee and board member, has the experience to know how women fit into financial engineering. She is enthusiastic about this career option. A mathematician by training and educated at Yale, Beder did graduate work in operations research. She received an M.B.A. in finance from Harvard. She was managing director and head of the Strategic Quantitative Investment Division of Caxton Associates, LLC. Before that she spent more than 15 years on Wall Street, founding one of the first firms, SBCC, in 1987 to specialize in quantitative finance, private equity, and derivatives. She co-founded and served as president of Capital Market Risk Advisors and was a vice president of The First Boston Corporation. Named as one of the top 50 women in finance around the world by Euromoney, Beder recalls that the glass ceiling never prevented her from climbing to the next level. Still, she quips, “I can assure you, there was rarely a line at the ladies room at any finance conference,” but quickly adds that she had mentors along the way who were more interested in bringing along talented professionals than the color of their skin or gender. She notes that in university programs today there is a “more evenly balanced room” although it is still less than what women will find in most professions. As a research analyst, Himani Trivedi devotes her time on collateralized debt obligations and collateralized loan obligations and other multi-strategies at Symphony Asset Management, a hedge fund working with high yield bonds, leverage loans, convertible bonds, and structured products. Specifically, she determines the type and parameters of the investment that can be invested according to the structure and requirements of the products. This helps her efficiently manage the structure of the financial product to create value for investors. She has a thorough understanding of the market-risk appetites of various investors. Though there are just a couple of women on her trading desk with 16 men, she feels the number will increase. Since financial engineering has only existed in the last 20 years, Finnegan of Financial Engineering News observes that the field is changing more rapidly than it is for women engineers in steel mills, for instance. At the Haas School of Business women make up 10 to 20 percent of students in their financial engineering program. However, Kreitzman gets requests from investment firms looking for more women. “There is a big demand for women financial engineers to diversify the pool,” she re- Tanya Styblo Beder ports. Claremont Graduate University’s financial engineering management program currently has 17 women and 28 men, and many of them are from Asia, mainly China. But with the positives comes the reality that financial engineering is aggressive and taxing in the number of hours that are devoted to it. Beder says she averaged 80 to 100 hours for the first 20 years of her career and in her last position worked 60 to 80 hours, which is like a vacation. Though the job is demanding, those in it say that if you love what you are doing and are challenged, the time is not an issue. What is the attraction for engineers? Currently a risk analyst with Western Asset Management and a June 2007 graduate of Claremont Graduate University’s financial engineering management program, Sudha Sethuraman was not interested in “implementing someone else’s design code,” as she puts it. Parlaying her interest in financial management, the stock market, and math, she decided to get an M.B.A. She already had a degree in information technology. Part way through her M.B.A. she realized that a quantitative field like financial engineering would be more challenging. After completing her M.B.A., she started on her financial engineering degree because of the opportunity to combine her math and technical skills and to take on projects such as modeling and pricing new options, derivatives, and developing hedging strategies. For her, the major attraction of financial engineering was its blend of mathematics, finance, and computer science. Himani Trivedi, also wanted to explore the complexities of finances. She has a chemical engineering degree and an M.B.A. and received a master’s in financial engineering 52 SWE FALL 2007
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