From college drop-out and psych ward to leading data science at top 20 bank...

[ateares]

My life has been a whirlwind...

From college drop-out and ultimately ODing and ending up in a hospital psych-ward... to leading enterprise data science at a top 20 bank in the US...

"It's a miracle..."

I don't remember everything that happened those 13 days... But the doctors had pumped me full of everything under the sun. I had received sedatives to keep me from being combative. Then they gave me anti-psychotics which caused me to have seizures... then the gave me anti-seizure meds that caused me to go psychotic... really fun ride...

I vaguely remembered the white padded walls and a single mattress... something like you see in the movies. There was a camera. They were always watching..

And then I woke up... my father by my bed side. I'd never seen the man cry before... but he was. I told him, "I'm sorry... I'm sorry..." over and over in Cantonese. That's all I could do. That's all I could remember.

A day or maybe two later, it was my 22nd birthday. I was in a hospital bed and my family had a cake. They sang... I started to remember English... It started to come back to me. But I had to kick them out because it was too loud. All my senses were out of wack coming off all the various drugs... It was a hard time in my life.

I did therapy and court mandated counseling... but my family was so scared of the people I'd associated with that they sent me to live with my Uncle in Hong Kong.

That's how I ended up spending the 6 months in Hong Kong and started to turn my life around...

Hong Kong was great... but life in the city wasn't easy either. My Uncle had it made and was successful business man, but I had to figure out the living part on my own...

I had a place to stay but everything else was on me...

I made friends with my broken Cantonese, and did what I could to get by. Finding vendors and tracing their mainland manufacturers became a game for me... I got really good and find electronics in bulk for a fraction of what we'd get them for in the US. Being an overseas reseller was tricky at the time, but paid well enough.

This was before Alibaba took over and what felt like 99% of ecom was through ebay. I was able to do mini-resale deals and ship them back to the states without paying customs by using family as an intermediary.

This was fun while it lasted... eventually, I was shipped back to my parents and advised to finish up school and get my life in order...

I was on it.

I started back at a local university and finished my undergrad in finance with a concentration in banking. Landed a job with a large regional bank and got into there leadership development program.

Spent the first couple of years placed in their corporate underwriting department learning everything from oil & gas deals to government and municipalities, handled the trouble debt restructures (TDR)s and syndications deals, managed bank-owned life insurance (BOLIs) and premium finance and community reinvestment act (CRA) portfolios. There were four of us analysts supporting the entire department, so I had a chance to learn a little bit of everything.

It was like drinking from a firehose, but I learned more about M&As, credit, underwriting, cash flow, financing, portfolio management and leverage in those 2 years than most folks learn in a lifetime. I also got really good at automating all of my reports and quantitative analysis...

During my time there, I started automating my reports using Excel and macros and then taught myself SQL and Access to get data from our source systems. I SUCKED at programming... but the things I was able to do set me apart from all of my peers...

I built one report that provided industry breakdowns and summaries across each of our 12 sectors that we could refresh monthly with a 15 minute query run... It used to take the entire team the first two weeks of each month to gather all the data and run the calculations to build that part.

I was ecstatic!

And this is how I made my first $4 BILLION mistake...

See, I was so excited about the reporting I'd develop and the time savings, that I rushed it over to our department head's office. I showed him what I'd done and gave him the portfolio summary for the month end. He was excited too and was going to start using it for the credit committee presentation the next day.

I show up the next morning and start checking out my code to see if I could clean it up and make it run faster... And that's when I saw it...

I had dropped over a hundred records during one of the table joins...

See, I didn't know the difference between a left join and an inner join because I didn't actually know how to code SQL... I just kept looking stuff up and trying to make it work...

Well, those 100 records translated to roughly ~$4 Billion in exposure that we didn't capture on the report... I rushed over to the department head's office, with fear and trembling... and told him right away that the numbers were off and we couldn't use the report...

Calm as a cucumber, he said, "Do you know what caused the problem?" "Yes," I replied.

"Ok, and can you fix it?" "Yes sir"

"Ok, and will you make this same mistake again?" "No sir," I responded.

And that was it... I was so worried that I was going to lose my job or get chewed out... but he saw that I found the error and could fix it and that I'd learned from my mistake. Mistakes happen and you just have to learn from them and work hard to not let the same ones happen again.

Well, needless to say I didn't make that mistake ever again, and since learned to do unit testing every step of the way when writing queries and joins.

I went on to join the enterprise data office and learned much more about sql, data analysis, database design and architecture, business intelligence, AI/ML and how to practically apply these things to drive the bottom line.

My team went on to build out the first event-driven email marketing campaign for the bank and generated $400M+ in incremental revenue in the first year of deployment, we developed an AI/ML research lab and employed neural networks and reinforcement learning to solve complex optimization problems, and later I had the opportunity to build out a Center of Excellence for Tableau.

During this time, I also had the opportunity to lead the Asian business resource group and oversee ~1,500 teammates across 18 different regions, chaired the internal department United Way campaign, and served on multiple bank-wide committees for technology and innovation.

By most standards, I was at the top of my game and a success...

But I wasn't happy...

The culture had shifted and I no longer felt like I was living out my values and purpose...

So, I left...

That was back in October '21.

And here I am today...

I'm a part of a start-up leveraging my AI/ML background and I'm building a ministry- "to help men leave a legacy for their families and future generations" - which is my personal purpose.

I love personal development and expanding my horizon and being parts of communities where people are driven and committed to growth.

Look forward to connecting and offering value where I can. And if there's anything I can do for you please, don't hesitate to ask...

Be Blessed!
Alex

 

Dislike ads? Become a Fastlane member: Subscribe today and surround yourself with winners and millionaire mentors, not those broke friends who only want to drink beer and play video games. :-)