Student Spotlight: Rodrigo Rivera

Rodrigo Rivera Headshot

Rodrigo Rivera

Major: Canfield BHP, Finance, Minor in MIS

Topics of Interest: finance, statistics, policy research, global markets, Python coding

Finance major, data wiz, numbers guru. Rodrigo Rivera, a talented Canfield BHP senior with a knack for numbers, transferred to the program his sophomore year seeking a more comprehensive education and has majored in finance with a minor in MIS ever since. An international student, Rodrigo comes to us as a native of Mexico, born and raised in Tampico, who came to the states just after being accepted to UT. Now a senior in Canfield BHP, Rodrigo recalls his time interning at Goldman Sachs and shares his experience during the pandemic, working with the Salem Center for Policy, a center that helps students, business leaders, and policymakers apply data-driven insights to complex problems. 

Read on to hear about his experience and research!

Tell us about where you have been and where you are now.

Last spring, I studied abroad in Prague. We were called back in March because of the COVID pandemic but it was still a great experience. I don’t regret going. I spent at least one month and a half meeting people from all over and getting to know Europe.

Then during the summer, I interned with Goldman Sachs in their global markets division. I ended up accepting a full-time offer with them and once I graduate, I’ll go back and move to New York and work full time there in July. 

Now, I have been working with the Salem Center for Policy since last semester. I found out about the role through one of my very close friends. He was already working there while I was studying abroad. To help with expenses at home while at UT, I started working part-time and was looking for similar roles when I eventually got interviewed by my boss, TJ. They were looking for students who already had some coding experience, like Python experience, which I had because of my MIS Minor. I got interviewed and got the role. 

What is the Salem Center for Policy?

The Salem Center is a center at McCombs which focuses on policy research. We have ten professors, researchers who of course, lead the research, and hire undergrads to help them with programming and things they need. We also provide idea generation but the regular steps to get into our side of research, which is with TJ Cannon, a postdoc, is that he interviews students (freshman to juniors) during the fall, then he chooses a cohort of about six or seven students. We have seven students right now who are enrolled. My colleague Andrew and I, who are already part of the research, are the TAs. In this class, he teaches students how to code, stats, econometrics, all the tools that they need so they can come back next fall and start researching with him and other professors at the center. 

There are tons of projects we work on. However, these last two semesters, the main focus has been, of course, COVID. 

Tell us more about the project you are working on involving COVID.

Andrew and I have been working on a website for the last semester which provides insights and data visualizations using COVID data on a national scale. Our main focus has been grabbing relevant data and creating visualizations for that data. For example, we came up with a restriction score against unemployment with our head researcher to show a correlation between lockdowns and more unemployment. We were also able to add color codes that represent Republican versus Democratic areas to identify them. We’re still working on making this graph interactive so you could click and see individual states and their information but that’s still a work in progress. And yes, we do all this stuff, all these national graphs, visualizations, labor force participation, and then, of course, our main focus is Texas. Then, our head researchers grab all this research and share it online. They share it with the local Austin government policymakers and then provide their suggestions that policymakers can use to make informed decisions.

What have you taken away from the Salem Center for Policy so far?

The good thing about this job is that it helps you uniquely think about the world. It helps you to understand the data instead of just reading the numbers that people are publishing. You can then go ahead and take the data, make your visualizations, and form your own opinion. So I think that’s the purpose of this research and that’s basically what our boss, TJ, tells us.

The point here is not to make coders. We’re not software engineers and he’s not trying to make the best coders just so we can create the graphs that he wants. He wants us to learn how to think about issues in the real world and form our own opinions so we can make our statements about what we think. This is a policy research lab so we, of course, debate policy and we tend to disagree a lot with each other or with our boss and that’s okay. He would rather we come and tell him what we think versus just agreeing with him because he’s our boss. It wouldn’t be a constructive conversation. I think that’s the best thing you get out of this research. 

More than that, of course, you get a lot of technical experience, like all the coding and the statistics, that’s very useful. But the main thing is that we’re going to be able to go out and analyze issues and policies on our own and create our own opinions.

You’ll be heading to New York to work with Goldman Sachs after you graduate. What sort of role will you be taking on and how do you see some of the experience that you’ve gained at the Salem Center fitting in that role?

The role I’ll be taking on is called a structuring role within Global Markets or as it’s better known, the Sales and Training Division where you have the salesman, the traders, and structures. 

Structured finance is a sector of finance that gives access to companies to complex financing. These cannot be solved by regular financing. 

I think how I’m going to be able to apply everything I’ve learned is the same process. If you think about it; you get a new problem, right? How can you solve it?  For example, here, we get data, and we have to think about how we can visualize it in a way that makes sense for people. 

That’s the thinking process that I think will benefit me from this job including all the techniques on the technical side, the statistics, and the econometrics that I learned with TJ. All of those skills including my Python coding experience will be very useful when creating models.

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