Engineering and Finance

It was during my senior year at The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) that the team I led embarked on a semester-long “Capstone Project” for my major, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. As a team, we were tasked with the design of a manufacturing process to build “Absorbed Glass Mat” (AGM) batteries for Exide. This battery technology is often utilized in rough environments since they provide better cranking power and reliability.

The first step in the development of a new battery production process is to design, then model, a production line in a computer program called HYSIS.

HYSIS estimates the yields of desired product, and then allows optimization — according to the computer — for the best results. The program even claimed to measure the “risk” of certain manufacturing processes not operating properly in concert with one another.

Each day, it strikes me how similar the core thinking and lessons from Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering are to finance and economics. With Chemical Engineering, chemicals are used to design a production process in order to achieve a desired result. Likewise, in wealth management, an input is the starting point (often wealth), quantifiable goals are expressed, and then investments are structured to help achieve desired results.