Undergraduate Lesson #3: Seek sage advice

If there’s one distinctive aspect of my college life, it’s doing most things all alone, even when I really need help. I rarely consulted my professors, even though sometimes I felt I had to because I didn’t thoroughly understand the material. And for the single most critical decision I had to make, which is to shift from Computer Science to the right course, I fell short on seeking advice. I would have shifted out to Management Engineering had I known better.

I guess seeking advice is rather common-sensical. This doesn’t have to be limited to people. Although it’s vitally important to ask your parents, friends, professors or professional counselors, it’s also necessary to look for relevant information using various sources such as the media, library and of course the Internet. There’s a book on career planning which says that an important choice must be done only after thoughtful deliberation. But this requires seeking information from all possible sources. Hence, do your research.

Go back to index: Reflections on my Undergraduate Years

The Final Choice… for now

Approximately five months ago, I was definite in taking up a Master’s Degree in Mathematics. I brought down the choices of specialization to two: Finance or Operations Research. But something happened and I was forced to choose soon enough. It took me some time to rethink but I’m definite again this time. I’m going to pursue a MS Industrial Engineering, with specialization in Operations Research, at U.P. Diliman this next semester.

I tend to get bothered about the volatility of my decisions. I usually take into account all available information in making a choice. But these are not static, and so the choice becomes dynamic as well. But sometimes, firm decisions must be made, ones which are not easily swayed by changing situation. I hope my choice right now is an example of such a decision. So even if a Professional Science Master’s Degree becomes available in the future, my current choice will still hold up.

In a future post, I’ll be discussing why I chose Operations Research as my field of specialization.

Reality check

It has been exactly a month since I last posted on this blog. In one of my preliminary posts, I stated that I’ll be posting once per week. Time for a reality check: this blog has been up for about 11 weeks and I’ve made 14 posts (excluding this one). So I’m not yet lagging behind with respect to this goal. But this is an easy goal. Even monkeys who randomly blog (assuming they’ve evolved enough) can beat me.

Anyway, enough of this rambling thought. The thing is I’ll still be posting now and then. But I still need to churn out more…

Welcome to the abstract world!

When you get to work in the corporate world after graduation from college, the people there greet you with a "Welcome to the real world!" But now that I'm back to the academe, I can say to myself, "Welcome back to the abstract world!"

It's a good thing that I only take up one graduate subject this semester. It's entitled Advanced Probability and Martingales and it's about the foundations of probability theory. I guess it's enough to keep me busy while I'm deciding what course I will pursue at U.P. Diliman.

Measure space, sigma algebra, borel sets… keep them coming!

The Way of the Mathematician

Some things get outdated too quickly. What I am sure of a few months ago are no longer valid or have changed significantly today. The following is an essay I wrote for my graduate study at the Ateneo, a time when I definitely want to pursue a master's degree in mathematics. In a future post, I'll think about what I wrote in this essay.

Freeware for historical prices of Philippine stocks

Since I got acquainted with the basics of investments, I decided to learn more. I invested in a mutual fund and got interested in stock investing. Unfortunately, I lacked both the technical knowledge and the data. Theory cannot be tested without data.

So I inquired at the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) for its data products. They do have the data but at astronomical prices. These are clearly intended for institutional and big-time investors.

But I still want the data. So I resolved to obtain them using other means. My next step was to manually collect data from the PSE website. My mathematician-programmer colleague knows how to simplify this process by doing screen scraping, but this is a bit technical for me. Although the data collection only took me less than five minutes per trading day, it's still a boring and tedious task.

Imagine my delight when I learned about a freeware which gets PSE data, suitably called PSEGet. I have to give thanks to the author Arnold Diaz, a Filipino software developer, for freely distributing this tool.

Now that data is available, it's time to learn the other side of the equation, the technical knowledge required for stock investing.

Rethinking my path

It was almost like a bombshell, although I did expect that the chances are not very significant. It's just unfortunate that I wasn't able to pass the DOST-PCASTRD scholarship for my graduate study.

Undergraduate Lesson #2: Save and invest

Although I took up introductory finance courses in college, the concepts of investment and even savings are relatively new to me, emerging only when I received my first few paychecks at work. In fact, I made a major blunder in college when I obliterated majority of my savings just to buy a Nintendo Gamecube. Yeah, I did enjoy blasting aliens in Metroid Prime but so were my pockets.

Fortunately, the nature of my work in "investment analysis" motivated me to learn about investments. I read personal finance books (e.g. the ones by Francisco Colayco), opened a savings account and finally invest a small amount in a mutual fund. I still have a long way to go, my next stop will probably be in stock trading, but this is significantly more complex, so it may take a while to learn.

Go back to index: Reflections on my Undergraduate Years

Return of the Programmer

My Java programming skill already waned due to neglect. Perhaps I can still charge it up by trying out interesting problems like the ones in the ACM programming contest. But maybe not anymore. As discussed in the previous post, I wrongly thought that there's little math in programming. So I guess it's best to concentrate on math software which supports programming, such as Mathematica (that is if I can get a free copy) or the open-source alternative Axiom. This may be the best possible solution yet, combining math & programming and concentrating on math ideas.

Undergraduate Lesson #1: Integrate your interests

I was once a Computer Science student before I opted for Mathematics to be my undergraduate degree. I was advised to take up a double major since I did quite well in both math and programming but I though that would be too difficult.

Looking back now, I shouldn't have neglected my programming skill even though I chose not to pursue a double major. I thought before that the two fields are mutually exclusive, i.e. math problem solving is bound on pen-and-paper while programming contains too little math concepts. Of course, I soon realized that I was so wrong.

Integrating interests is a way to make new connections, to do creative acts. Some of my favorite projects in college are a fusion of my interests. My undergraduate thesis (I'll talk about this in detail in a future post) is about fractal music, which combines my interests in math, programming and music. Similarly, I'll most likely do an interdisciplinary research for my graduate study.

How about you? Would you prefer this approach in your work / projects? In my opinion, integration allows for fuller self-expression.

Go back to index: Reflections on my Undergraduate Years