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WorldQuant University instructor Ken Abbott started his career with rejection. He did not get the job he wanted after graduating from Harvard University in 1983, so he worked at a regional bank in New Jersey for one year.

“I figured out I was in the right industry but the wrong company,” he said.

Ken persevered and interviewed the next year with some of the same people who already rejected him 12 months earlier. This time, he got hired. What followed was a 40-year Wall Street career at some of the world’s largest financial institutions.

Ken started at Bankers Trust and then joined Dutch bank ABN AMRO as a senior vice president in 1998. He later held senior-level positions at Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Barclays. Along the way, he earned two graduate degrees from New York University—a Master of Arts in Economics and Master of Science in Statistics and Operations Research.

Ken now brings this knowledge and experience to WQU, where he has taught in the Master of Science in Financial Engineering program since 2018. One life lesson he shares in the classroom is the importance of creative problem-solving.
When Ken started at Bankers Trust, the company had three IBM personal computers on an isolated floor at corporate offices in Midtown Manhattan. Few people knew how to use the machines, so Ken’s boss told him to do nothing else for one month except learn to use the equipment for financial engineering.

Ken quickly discovered that each computer had only 256 kilobytes of random-access memory, not nearly enough for the advanced operations he needed to perform. His solution? He went to a local electronics store, bought supplemental memory chips, and attached them to the motherboard while older colleagues watched in amazement.

“I plugged it in myself,” he said. “I figured it out.”

Another time, he had to figure out how to reprogram a modem to communicate with an incompatible data source.

“I sat there all Saturday afternoon writing code, trying to get this modem to speak in this other language,” he said. “And it worked.”

Technology changes and people today face vastly different challenges. But Ken said the need for creative problem-solving remains constant.

“Some tools are difficult to learn, and you must do most of the work on your own, but the payoff is rewarding,” he said. “That is what we want to get across to students at WorldQuant University.”

Ken said students who pass the early courses and persevere in the two-year program show high levels of tenacity and creativity. He said the capstone projects, which force students to apply theory to real-world problems, continue to impress him.

“I have been very pleased with the quality of the work that I have seen from students,” he said.

Watch on YouTube

• Bringing Wall Street to the Classroom (2:59)
• Problem-Solving the WQU Way (1:13)
• Real-World Quantitative Education (1:57)
• Financial Models in Everyday Life (0:51)
• Free, Online, High-Quality Education (1:05)
• Communication Skills for Quants (1:06)