Jamie Mullineaux

MMaths, 2016

Three words to describe your time at Warwick

Friendship, stimulating, rewarding.

Career aspirations

I'm still fairly new to the field I'm in, so progressing to a senior role is my short-term aim. In the longer term I'm looking at emerging industries and technologies where my skills could be used and helping mentor younger people looking for similar roles. Whatever I do, I expect my future roles will continue to change with the latest AI & machine learning trends.

Quant Analyst at Superbet

To what extent did you plan your career?

I was fortunate enough to gain a scholarship with Lloyds Banking Group in the summer before starting university. As such I probably spend less time thinking about my career than I should have. After spending 5 years there my career was starting to drift towards IT project management. I found that I enjoyed the technical side of the role a lot more than the organisational, planning and governance aspects. I also found I wasn't using any of the hard maths skills I'd gained. As such I took a year out, did an MSc in Data Science at UCL, partly to refresh my mathematical skills but mostly to gain the hard technical skills that would be needed for a quantitative role.

Had I of thought about my future career more whilst at Warwick I'd have taken more programming related modules at the time. Since then, I've started as a Quant Analyst within the sports betting industry.

How do you use your Maths degree in your job?

As a Quant Analyst, maths is pretty central to my job! Understanding probability distributions is key to choosing how to model a certain sport - e.g. corners in football are very different to goals. Then I need to understand how to optimise a model for the best parameters and choose a best model based on statistical tests.

It's also important to communicate how our models work, and the effect of any changes we make, to non-mathematical stakeholders - so experience of communicating mathematical concepts and creating compelling visuals is also important.

More general software engineering is also a key part of my job. Although I didn't do much coding at Warwick, the logical thinking and problem solving skills definitely provide a good baseline.

Why did you choose to study Maths at Warwick?

Aside from being a highly-rated course and university, the main attraction of the Warwick Maths course was the amount of flexibility given to students in choosing their modules throughout every year of the course. This, coupled with the wide variety of modules available, meant that I could find the areas of maths that I enjoyed most, and then specialise in these.

Which modules did you particularly enjoy/find useful?

Whilst at Warwick I focused on the pure mathematics modules. Two of the modules that I found most interesting and intellectually challenging were Algebraic Topology & Complex Analysis. They were amongst my favourite modules and definitely helped me to learn patience and skill in tackling hard problems.

However, with where my career has gone, I couldn't recommend enough taking a module with a significant coding aspect to it, as that's where I believe mathematical skills can best be leveraged in the future.

What core skills do you think you developed during your time at Warwick?

Communication: this is really important. One thing I've come to appreciate whilst working is that a good idea is worth nothing if you can't communicate it to key stakeholders - often non-specialists. Whilst the second-year essay and final year project were good opportunities to hone my communication skills, I found working on weekly assignments with other students equally helpful. Knowing a solution isn't the same as being able to explain it or teach someone!

Teamwork: similarly, in almost any career you'll need to work in a team, or lead a team, to get the job at hand done. Knowing how best to work with other people and get the best out of people is key. I became heavily involved in the table tennis club, spending two years on the exec as president. This helped me discover how to motivate others to get a fully functioning team. When running meetings, I learnt how to make sure everyone's voices were heard - not just those who were always the loudest.

Problem solving: this feels like it comes naturally with a Maths degree, but it shouldn't be underestimated. Learning how to stay patient when you get stuck, take a step back and look at a problem from a different angle is something that I found often turned a difficult maths problem into an easy one. That's just as true now that I'm working!