May 2025: Psychology to Quant Finance - Why the Switch?
My path to quantitative finance has been anything but conventional. What began in psychology lecture halls at Trinity has led me unexpectedly to Fordham Gabelli's Master's in Quantitative Finance program.
I entered psychology because I was deeply interested in people and how they think, behave, and experience the world. At Trinity, I immersed myself in understanding human cognition and behavior, fascinated by the interplay between our minds and environments.
My final-year thesis became a personal journey as much as an academic one. I explored the experiences of parents of children with selective mutism in Ireland - a condition I had battled myself as a child. Interviewing these families, analyzing their stories, and contributing research to a field that had directly impacted my life felt meaningful in ways I couldn't have anticipated. I was grateful to add something to the psychological literature that resonated on both academic and emotional levels.
But throughout my studies, something else kept tugging at my attention - numbers. In research methods courses, while other students dreaded the statistical portions, I found myself most engaged when working with data. Whether it was running analyses or interpreting results, the quantitative aspects energized me in unexpected ways.
I realized that while I deeply valued the insights I gained from psychology, what truly lit me up were patterns, probabilities, and the logic of mathematical reasoning. In psychology labs, I'd often find myself more interested in the methodology and statistical models than the psychological theories themselves.
I wanted to work in a space where I could engage with data in a more structured, technical way and where the work translated into something direct, concrete, and intellectually challenging. That led me to explore quantitative finance. It seemed to combine everything I was growing to love: applied mathematics, statistics, programming, and real-world problem-solving with measurable outcomes. I enrolled in the Certificate in Quantitative Finance (CQF), where I built foundational skills in Python, derivatives pricing, and financial modeling. The learning curve was steep, but the more I learned, the more I knew this was the direction I wanted to pursue.
Now, as I prepare to begin the MSQF program at Fordham, I am interested to learn more about behavioral finance - a field where my background in psychology actually becomes an asset. Understanding how emotion, cognitive bias, and social influence shape market dynamics offers a fascinating intersection of my past and future interests.
To some, the switch from psychology to quantitative finance might seem like a sharp pivot. But looking closer, it's a shift toward what energizes me most: solving complex problems with elegant mathematical frameworks, writing code that transforms abstract concepts into practical tools, and building models that capture patterns in seemingly chaotic systems.
Your career path doesn't have to be a straight line. The most rewarding trajectories come from following your curiosity, even when it leads you in unexpected directions. My background in psychology hasn't disappeared; it's simply being integrated into a new framework that feels more authentically me.