Zhiyuan Lu

I came to UW–Madison for economics, expecting the conventional path into finance. Turns out that's not what happened.

One night during junior year, at 3 AM, I was SSH'd into a server 7,000 miles away, fixing a production bug. That's when it clicked: my interest in finance isn't just in models, theories, and conclusions. It's in how systems get built and how they run in the real world.

From there I started building systems to learn: writing an options pricing engine to fact-check my textbooks, managing my own capital across four asset classes, and spending a summer at a quant fund pulling apart fund-of-fund portfolios to see how they balance constraints, risk, and execution.

I'm still studying economics. But the method is set: if I want to understand a system, I build it from scratch.

"Build it. Then you'll know."