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Personal Goal Statement

Anurag Kolla has loved math since preschool and sees it as a language to describe the world. They understand math concepts at their core rather than just memorizing rules. Their love of math and ability to look beyond rules will help them excel in quantitative finance, which applies math to the real world. For a research paper, they improved on correlational research methods by using standard deviation instead of just the mean. Anurag believes their expertise in math and experience with applications in finance make them well-suited for a career in quantitative finance.

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54 views2 pages

Personal Goal Statement

Anurag Kolla has loved math since preschool and sees it as a language to describe the world. They understand math concepts at their core rather than just memorizing rules. Their love of math and ability to look beyond rules will help them excel in quantitative finance, which applies math to the real world. For a research paper, they improved on correlational research methods by using standard deviation instead of just the mean. Anurag believes their expertise in math and experience with applications in finance make them well-suited for a career in quantitative finance.

Uploaded by

api-705354426
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Anurag Kolla

Mrs. Demarco

Monroe Township High School

20 November 2023

Personal Goal Statement

I love math. I loved it since I was in preschool, counting cookies, and I loved it during the

hardest parts of differential calculus. No matter how bad my grades got or how many

assignments I had due, I always knew that when I got around to doing that math test or

completing that math assignment, it would be a blast. And it always was.

Math to me feels like a language. It is the language used to describe the world and

everything that happens in it. Just like having an understanding of Spanish will help someone

navigate through and experience a Hispanic country, having an understanding of math can help

someone experience the world itself. But there is a catch. So many people force their way

through math in school, cramming their brains with formulas to memorize and rules to apply. I

always found this counter-intuitive. If math is a language there should be patterns and reasons for

something to work or happen. And there always is. In differential calculus, the derivative is the

closest approximation we have to a rate of change at a specific point. It is a way to translate a

graph of cost to a graph of the change in cost and a graph of revenue to a graph of the change in

revenue. The derivative is an idea that has so much application in the world of quantitative

finance yet when so many people learn math they don’t understand the core ideas behind it. That

is one of my biggest strengths.

My genuine love for math has given me the ability to look beyond rules. Rather than

memorizing, I understand. Every single concept I’ve learned from that first math class in
preschool I have understood why. Quantitative finance is the application of math to the real word

and so it requires an understanding of how it works. Predicting markets and creating investment

strategies is something that I believe I can do exceptionally well because I do understand. Since I

know how a mathematical model works I can do more than just use and create one; I can

improve upon one.

In terms of experience, one major event stands out to me as something that shows my

expertise in math. When creating an outline of the method section of a research paper I am

currently in the process of writing, I had to adjust statistical values to find the most impactful

way to represent the data I plan to collect. In correlational research, when multiple participants of

different groups are surveyed, it is often the mean or average of those participants that becomes

the data point associated with a specific group. While this definitely helped with finding an

overall correlation, I realized that other statistical values that are largely ignored in correlational

research could be incredibly helpful to my personal research. Standard deviation is the average

distance a point in a data set has from the center and it can be used to find the accuracy of a data

set. If I were to take the standard deviations rather than the means of my participant data for each

specific group, I realized that I could find out a correlation that means something completely

different to the mean correlation. Since I genuinely understood the purpose of mean and standard

deviation I was able to take the correlational research idea that people before me have perfected

and adjusted it to my liking.

I genuinely believe that with my background in mathematics, I can go headfirst into

quantitative finance and feel right at home. It combines applications in mathematics with

finance, two subjects that I have consistently shown expertise in. I hope to one day I won’t just

be a great quantitative analyst but change the field in a way no other person has done before me.

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