2020 COHORT
Tianhao Gu is a member of the Quant Program’s 2020 cohort, and later in 2021 he joined the Data Science Master Program as a dual degree student. Previously he graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) with a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, plus a minor in Finance, where he conducted several researches on health data analytics & modeling, option pricing, and completed a fixed income summer internship at one brokerage.
What pushed forward Tianhao’s switch from the finance world to technology can originally be traced back to the C++ data structures course he took in his last semester at RPI, when he laid some basics in computer science, and enjoyed the process of intensive coding under tight schedule. The project-intensive computer science courses he later took and is taking at UMich such as database system, web system development, information retrieval further consolidate his hard skills required by real industry.
During summer 2021, Tianhao worked as a data engineering intern at Appen Data Technology, and was mainly responsible for building and maintaining data pipeline and data flow process, of various projects in image, video, audio, text and map, before data can finally be trained by machine learning models. At there he quickly gained strong interest in the application of different big data platforms and data middlewares in solving data storage, access & integration problems, and all principles behind screen as well.
Tianhao’s intermediate goal is to seek a position in software engineering or data engineering at a tech company or engineering division at a financial institution. He is confident that the high-quality coursework and rich academic resource at University of Michigan can provide him with solid system-related knowledge and hand-on project experiences to become a strong candidate in job market. He always believes that as an engineer or a tech-professional, what you do can directly put everyone’s idea or demand into physical reality, and may benefit hundreds of thousands of people’s daily life consequently.
In his free time, Tianhao enjoys watching TV-series, playing soccer, and is open to any topic related to European Soccer League.