Alumni Profiles

What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?

After graduating from Bowdoin, I began teaching high school mathematics at a small public school in Richmond, Maine, where I spent three years. I then moved to North Yarmouth Academy, a private school in Yarmouth, Maine, and taught math there for eight years. Following that chapter, I returned to Bowdoin and have been working in the Office of the Dean of Students ever since, holding a variety of roles. I am now the associate dean of students, serving as the dean for first-year students and overseeing the first-year experience.

Why mathematics?

When I immigrated to the US from Vietnam at age twelve, I started seventh grade without knowing any English. Learning the language was difficult for me, with all of its inconsistencies and lack of clear logic. Math, on the other hand, felt like a universal language—consistent, reliable, and something I could fully understand even when everything else felt unfamiliar. It gave me comfort and confidence at a time when I needed it most.

I experienced something very similar when I arrived at Bowdoin. As a first-generation, low-income student, I often felt lost and out of place. Once again, I turned to mathematics and the math department for grounding. I found not just academic clarity, but also a welcoming and supportive community. My very first math professor and advisor, Professor Bill Barker, played a central role in making me feel like I belonged. His encouragement and mentorship had a lasting impact on me.

Majoring in math has shaped the way I approach my career and my life. Just as math gave me confidence and direction, I hope to provide that same sense of support and possibility to my students today.

What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?

After graduating from Bowdoin, I began my career in finance, eventually landing a role on a trading desk as an equity derivatives trader. This position allowed me to apply my mathematics background daily in a fast-paced, data-driven environment. After five years in sales and trading, I decided to shift career paths and pursue an MBA at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Following business school, I joined a tech start-up, where I gained valuable exposure to the entrepreneurial side of business and the challenges of scaling growth.

Today, I am a management consultant at Bain & Company in Boston, where I help companies address their most pressing strategic challenges. Much of my work involves analyzing vast and complex datasets to uncover insights that guide critical business decisions. Whether identifying new growth opportunities, optimizing operations, or evaluating private equity investments, I rely on the structured, mathematical thinking I developed at Bowdoin to distill complexity into clear, actionable strategies.

Why mathematics?

I was drawn to mathematics because of its precision, structure, and ability to make sense of complexity. At Bowdoin, I loved how math trained me to break big problems into smaller, solvable parts, a skill that has carried through every stage of my career. Today, as a consultant, that mindset remains at the core of my work.

We often deal with enormous, complex datasets, from customer behavior patterns to operational performance metrics, and the challenge is to extract the signal from the noise. My math background enables me to approach these problems systematically: structuring analyses, building models, and ultimately uncovering insights that help clients make critical strategic decisions. While I didn’t pursue a “pure math” career, the discipline continues to shape how I think, problem-solve, and communicate recommendations in a clear, evidence-based way.

Are there any classes, professors, or experiences that had a lasting impact on you?

Without question, Professor Taback had a lasting impact on me during my time at Bowdoin. She was a fantastic teacher, an even better person, and someone whose enthusiasm for mathematics was contagious. Her genuine love for the subject inspired all of us to see math not as abstract exercises on a whiteboard but as a way to solve meaningful, real-world problems.

One of the best examples of this was her course on cryptography, where she illustrated how mathematical concepts could be applied to everyday challenges like security and communication. The class revealed the power of math as both a sophisticated theory and a practical toolkit, bridging abstract ideas with real-world applications in ways that felt exciting and relevant. That perspective has stayed with me, shaping how I approach complex challenges today by searching for the underlying structures that lead to practical, impactful solutions.

What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?

Right after graduation, I joined SOSV, a global venture capital firm specializing in deep tech, at IndieBio, one of their brands in San Francisco. SOSV invests in early-stage startups, often at company formation, and has an extensive infrastructure and partnership ecosystem to accelerate and fund startups pioneering deep tech for human health, sustainability, resilient infrastructure, defense, and the future of science. What I enjoy most about my job is the exposure and the ability to work with driven startup founders, thanks to our firm's portfolio approach, which matches a wide range of technologies—whether biomanufacturing, physics-informed AI, or automated process control—with different industrial problems and financing mechanisms.

I was the fifth employee at IndieBio, and it has been a privilege to grow with the firm over the past eight years, navigating multiple funds, new leadership, and major initiatives such as expanding the platform in New York City and handling partnerships with corporates and the manufacturing sector in India. Even though I have been at the same firm for almost a decade, its scope evolves dramatically every three years or so, driven by rapid changes in technology and innovation financing worldwide. My job keeps me busy and takes me all over the world, and I am grateful to have found a home base in the Bay Area, where I live with my partner, who is also a Polar Bear.

Why mathematics?

I grew up in India, where the schooling system prioritizes a strong arithmetic foundation for all things STEM, and students are exposed to the rigor of the system and pressure from math teachers to perform well in highly competitive exams. My dad is an engineer, and my mom is a retired chemistry professor, so doing well in math was non-negotiable. I was fortunate to enjoy the challenge that math presented, and I began to enjoy preparing for exams and competitions.

Everything changed when I attended high school at an international school under the IB curriculum. There, I met a very supportive math teacher, Dr. Parag Mehta, who introduced me to math as a way to think, problem-solve, and enjoy the process, rather than treating it purely as a competition or Olympiad. That experience kick-started my love for math as a discipline to interact with the world. Bowdoin's math department reinforced this love, and I didn’t have to think much before deciding to major in math. It felt like a natural progression because I genuinely enjoyed the coursework. Something special about the major is how collaborative it is: students are encouraged to work on the same problem in a group and expected to write up their solutions in their own words. That ability to ideate and deliver as part of a small team continues to help me tremendously in my work today.

Are there any classes, professors, or experiences that had a lasting impact on you?

My independent study with Professor Thomas Pietraho was one of the highlights of my math major. We delved into the mathematical fundamentals of neural networks, exploring concepts such as activation functions, convolutions, stochastic gradient descent, and back-propagation, and how they work together to perform classification tasks. Professor Pietraho designed and guided me through a hands-on exercise where we scraped thousands of book cover images from twenty-one different genres online and trained a neural network using Bowdoin’s high-performance computer services. We tested how well the network could classify the images into their respective genres, experimenting with accuracy as a function of network depth versus width.

This project was an excellent way to move back and forth between theory and deployment. It fueled my curiosity and inspired me to analyze how these concepts are applied in industry, giving me the confidence to approach practitioners and ask insightful questions. My interest in this field ultimately led me to explore how neural networks are used in drug discovery, material discovery, and medical imaging, which in turn led to my role at IndieBio, where startups were beginning to deploy these concepts in practice. With the benefit of hindsight and professional experience, I now realize how easy it is to rely on off-the-shelf tools. Truly understanding their inner workings and fundamentals, and knowing how to ask the right questions, is precisely the skill set that Bowdoin trains you to develop.

What advice would you give to current students or recent graduates interested in your field?

We live in interesting times. The promise of technology is often accompanied by disruption, and the complexities of geopolitics are creating unprecedented supply-chain challenges. Adapting and evolving with these changes requires both recent graduates and industry veterans to continually test and experiment with the latest technologies, stay informed, and remain curious. Sometimes, this means stepping beyond your math-major identity or liberal-arts identity and learning by doing.

At the same time, it’s essential to develop a set of core beliefs and opinions that remain steady day to day, providing a backbone for your career. These beliefs should be updated gradually over time, informed by evidence, trusted counsel, and experience. Without this foundation and genuine interest in your field, it’s easy to get distracted by the latest shiny trend, hype, or a job that may not offer long-term fulfillment.

What have you been up to since Bowdoin?

After graduating, I joined a network epidemiology lab at Georgetown University to gain additional research experience before applying to graduate school. My research has been focused on characterizing spatiotemporal heterogeneity in public health behaviors, such as mask-wearing and contact patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic, and global historical smallpox vaccination relevant to the 2022 monkeypox outbreak. In the fall of 2023, I’ll be starting a PhD program in biology with an emphasis on mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.

Why math?

I never expected to be a math major, but I felt so supported by professors, TAs, and my peers while taking Multivariable Calculus (with Prof. Barker) and Intro to Math Reasoning (with Prof. Taback) during my first year that I kept coming back. I loved the collaborative, problem-solving environment (especially when nearly the entire class would be out at the second-floor whiteboard during office hours) and felt that a math degree would equip me with the tools to do impactful quantitative biology research. The flexibility of the major allowed me to concentrate on applied math courses and continue pursuing my other interests in biology and computer science, culminating in an honors thesis advised by Prof. Zeeman and Prof. Irfan (in CS). .

What have you been up to since Bowdoin?

My liberal arts education at Bowdoin College, particularly my Mathematics major and my Computer Science minor, provided me with crucial analytical tools for pursuing graduate studies. Yet, it also provided me with a well-rounded background that allowed me “to be at home in all lands and all ages” (President Hyde) and fit well in new academic institutions and programs.

 I have always been fascinated with areas of studies that combine mathematics, economics, and international relations. Thus, since graduation I have been enrolled in a Master of Arts program from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. This MA has a special concentration in economics, an additional one in international relations, and it also offers several quantitatively challenging courses. Thus, it has been the perfect way to culminate my passions.

I look forward to the start of the second semester in JHU’s campus in Bologna, Italy, and to the following year in Washington D.C, particularly, since I will be closer to Brunswick and will have the possibility of coming back to my alma mater.

Why math?

Talking about the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra at family dinners, determining new recipe portion ratios and solving interest rate problems in long car rides were normal parts of my childhood. The integration of math and its applications were embedded in me at an early age. Because of this, studying mathematics or economics in college had always been a possibility. At the age of 14 however, I left my home country, Mexico, to go study abroad in Quebec, Canada. Completely opening up my perception of the world and allowing me to see that not only did I enjoy learning and understanding mathematics and economics, but also different cultures and the reasons why they act and interact with people differently. Thus, after arriving at Bowdoin the question was: mathematics, economics or international relations? If I chose the latter, it would have been hard to pursue further quantitative studies. With a mathematics degree however, pursuing any of the other areas of study remained a possibility. This is one of the main reasons why I chose math.