Practical Project Experience Provides Students With Valuable Career Preparation
Employment is becoming increasingly skills-focused. Indeed, the abilities to communicate effectively, problem-solve and quickly learn and apply new technologies, for instance, are proving to be of the utmost importance for landing jobs and nurturing early careers.
With this in mind, NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management (MTSM) is designing real-world projects for students that promote the development of highly sought-after skills. For example, Stephen Taylor, assistant professor of finance at MTSM, is devising and advising on initiatives that enable students to gain desirable competencies while learning what quantitative financial analysts do on a daily basis: track risk and performance metrics; organize, store and make financial data readily available; and create predictive models and more.
“At MTSM, we are diligently encouraging NJIT undergraduate students to augment their course work with customized open-ended research projects in an area of their interest. To date, such projects have mainly focused on the interdisciplinary integration and application of ideas from the mathematics, statistics and computer science disciplines, with the goal of developing solutions for practical problems that arise in the social sciences,” said Taylor. “Our central aims, in conjunction with the NJIT 2025 Building on a Strong Foundation initiative, are to re-emphasize faculty focus on student support and appreciation — instituting a collegial, data-centric and idea-oriented culture — and to promote increased research prominence and quality within MTSM.”
Here is a roundup of the latest projects.
Project Name: Analytics for the Student Investment Fund
The MTSM Investment Fund, a student-run initiative supported by faculty and the management school’s Board of Advisers, is in its third year of operation, with $48,000 in investments. Students acquire real-world investing experience and develop practical equity-analyst and risk-management skills through the fund. At every semester’s end, they present the fund’s portfolio to the board for review and approval.
“Students are getting more involved, and with big interest our fund is growing,” said Milena Bajic, a finance alumna and current fintech master’s student who is the fund’s president. “If not next year, but the year after that one, I believe we can double our fundings.”
To advance this objective, Sam Pierre, the fund’s senior analyst and a mathematics of finance/actuarial science major, is working with the fund’s portfolio management team to expand the risk and performance dashboard that is used to monitor the equity portfolio. The dashboard was designed and implemented in the Python programming language, using a Plotly dashboard framework, the Bloomberg application programming interface for data and the cloud platform, Heroku, for remote hosting.
“It is still a work in progress, but we already have a base project that we are going to work from and make it more fluid,” Pierre said. “It will be important to track our performance … to achieve our goal, which is to make enough profit so the proceeds can go toward a scholarship.”
Project Name: Option Analytics for The Funding Group of Kingston
The goal was to build a dashboard for The Funding Group of Kingston, N.J., that enabled quick visualization and monitoring of real-time options data. Charles Auriemma, who will graduate this December with a bachelor’s degree in financial technology, played a lead role in working with Taylor on the project.
They began by designing a dashboard template complete with colors, fonts, menus and graphs, and then tailoring it by populating the menus with ticker symbols, maturities and other information provided by the client. Then, using the Python programming language, they were able to select a certain option ticker and its maturity in the dropdown menus, and the accompanying graph would fill in accordingly with the option price over a specific period of time.
Through the collaboration with Martin Tuchman School of Management, The Funding Group says it gained valuable insights into option spread pricing and how the relationship between option contracts changes over time. Using this knowledge, the firm increased the returns on its long/short hedge portfolio.
“The involvement in this project taught me how to take client specifications and turn it into a functioning product. I became more confident with my ability to write code and learned a plethora of information about the options market,” offered Auriemma. “I am beyond grateful for this opportunity.”
Project Name: Analytics for the University Endowment
The NJIT Endowment Fund has a portfolio of over $100 million that is invested in both private and public financial vehicles. When a more efficient way was needed to monitor the individual liquid securities in the fund, Pablo Arrutia Sota ’19, then an applied mathematics/applied physics Honors student with an interest in finance and statistics, was charged with creating an interactive, data-driven risk and performance metrics dashboard.
“Basically, we made it easier to obtain, track and analyze endowment fund-related financial data, so that NJIT could make better decisions [about the portfolio],” Sota said.
As a follow-up to this project, Pierre examined the endowment fund and found that not only was the portfolio’s allocation underperforming, but some of the assets were charging more in management fees than other comparable assets and not yielding the same or better results. This analysis was consistent with the university’s Joint Investment Committee's findings stemming from a recent review of the endowment portfolio.
“I am very grateful for the opportunity I had last year to work on this project,” remarked Pierre. “Helping NJIT in the process is something any student would value dearly.”
Taylor noted that students are needed to continue refining the endowment fund analytics and, in turn, further improve university operations.
Project Name: Webscraping
For a finance research project that involved constructing a dataset of mutual fund managers throughout the country, Emon Mirghahari ’19, a graduate in business management with a concentration in finance, employed a practice called web scraping. It involves extracting large amounts of data from internet sites, in this case LinkedIn to gather and organize profile information of the managers according to age, sex, race and other factors.
Because dealing with large datasets can produce repetitive and unclear facts and figures, he also had to do additional research on the managers to find and/or confirm the requested characteristics. Then he constructed and cleaned the data to enable the researchers — Taylor and his colleagues — to discern commonalities among the managers.
“This project gave [Emon] a practical experience in dealing with many of the complexities that arise when constructing, cleaning and formatting datasets, which is often where both quantitative analysts and academic researchers spend the majority of their time,” noted Taylor.
Mirghahari, who recently left a finance-associate position to go back to school for his master’s degree, concurs. “I am more familiar with datasets that seem overwhelming, [and] after doing this project I have a lot more confidence.”
Looking for Students
One other project Taylor oversees is in need of undergraduate students. He has been working with Metro Exhibits, “a full-service provider of custom and rental trade show exhibits, booths and displays,” to better organize and automate part of the company’s marketing process — particularly its extensive list of marketing contacts that was crashing in Excel. A Python-based solution was implemented that now successfully maintains this list.
“We have to keep track of thousands of trade shows, exhibits and contacts per year and our database had gotten too large and cumbersome to continue using programs like Excel. We got in touch with Stephen Taylor at Martin Tuchman School of Management and his students to help us build an automated system for managing this data,” said James Gibson, Metro Exhibits’ director of marketing. “We are floored by their ability, expertise and hard work. Their efforts in automating processes have increased our efficiency tremendously and we could not be happier with the results. A big ‘thank you’ to everyone involved!”
Although not “finance-related per se,” Taylor said, the Metro Exhibits project demonstrates MTSM’s openness and eagerness to apply “data science/programming techniques to solve social sciences problems.”
