My Journey

My name is Sivanagi Reddy Modugula. I have a Masters’ degree in mathematics from Courant Institute of Mathematics, New York University (NYU). I’m currently working as a quantitative developer at JP Morgan London.

“There is a creative drive-in mathematics; it is all about movement trying to express itself,” said French mathematician Claire Voisin. I was fascinated by this very nature of mathematics since my childhood.

I have an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology New Delhi. Then I started my career, working as a digital signal processing engineer for a couple of years in India.

The beauty of mathematics, my passion for mathematics and the need to learn advanced mathematics to excel in the field of my interest, motivated me to pursue a degree in mathematics.

My interest in applied mathematics began to grow while I was pursuing the undergraduate program in Engineering. It continued to grow while I was working in the industry as I came to understand that advanced mathematical techniques are necessary to design and build complex application systems. For example, it requires several mathematical techniques involving linear algebra, differential equations, probability, real analysis and complex analysis to design a noise cancellation algorithm, audio or video compression, encoding and decoding algorithms. 

I could see that a strong mathematical background could teach me valuable skills and thus differentiate me from fellow engineers and help me reach my goal of excelling in the field of Engineering.

During the masters in mathematics program at NYU I had the opportunity to study mathematical courses such as linear algebra, probability, partial differential equations, multivariable calculus, mathematical analysis, complex analysis as well as interdisciplinary courses such as physiology and machine learning.

At NYU there is so much emphasis on research in interdisciplinary areas. Mathematics is going to be the key driving the upcoming technologies. This was one of the reasons for me to choose a masters program in applied mathematics.

As part of the course work, I got the opportunity to do projects in computational neuroscience and machine learning.  I also did research on portfolio theory and wrote my thesis on this topic. The program was intense but the learning experience was great. Studying advanced mathematics gives me knowledge and skills to analyse real world problems from first principles and formulate them as mathematical problems. Mathematical training is helping me to solve many difficult problems in my work. Also, it improved my confidence.

Students with a strong mathematical background have a wide variety of opportunities in the job market. A mathematical background coupled with good programming skills are in high demand for positions such as quantitative analysts, quantitative researchers, data scientist and software engineering. Students who explore interdisciplinary fields and gain knowledge of these fields, definitely have an advantage in the job market.