When John Criezis ’07 was a kid, it didn’t matter whether it was electric pencil sharpeners or the stock market: if something could be broken down and analyzed, he was all over it.
Raised in Evanston, IL, Criezis, was a youngster ahead of his time, right down to the childhood stock portfolio he began managing at the age of 12. On those occasions when his stocks tanked, Criezis wasn’t discouraged. Instead, he says, “I saw it as a challenge to get better, to better understand what I was investing in, so that if a stock went wrong, I wanted it to happen because of something I saw as a risk, not something that I didn’t expect.”
Flash-forward a dozen years, and Criezis, now 26, is doing the same thing at T. Rowe Price, where he’s currently analyzing stocks with Price’s International Equities Team. The full-time job is his latest stop on a whirlwind tour of the world of finance, courtesy of a two-year Investment Fellowship, funded by T. Rowe Price, that Criezis began upon graduation from the Whiting School. The global investment management firm, which usually offers four such fellowships each year, specifically targets engineers or those with engineering-like skills. “As the finance industry has evolved, math, computer science, and engineering people have an advantage [as] the analytics have become more advanced,” says Criezis. “Everything has become more mathematically based.”
Prior to his current posting at Price, Criezis went through the equivalent of financial boot camp, with six-month intensive exposures in four different departments at T. Rowe Price: Asset Allocation, Equity Trading, Quantitative Fixed Income, and Risk Management. Though called a fellowship, the program is in fact a full-time appointment with pay commensurate to that of other entry-level positions in the field. As part of his duties, Criezis analyzed numerous models for predicting success and failure, and created his own models for simulations. Of his work now on International Equities, he notes, “I’m using a lot of the quantitative tools I helped build while I was working in the fellowship program.”
Criezis, who completed the E&M minor while a student at the Whiting School, enjoys the opportunity to intermingle finance and engineering. He finds it gives him an edge up, especially when, as part of analyzing a stock, he meets with senior management from high-tech companies.
“Just this morning, I was on a call with a company that makes very specialized equipment for the semiconductor industry. If I wasn’t an engineer, I probably wouldn’t understand how these chips are made … if you really understand product differentiation, you can [tell] whether they have an advantage against a competitor, versus just trying to sell a puff of smoke.”