Nader AlEtaywi, an open learner from Jordan, describes how MIT's educational resources helped him make the leap into a career in finance.
When Nader AlEtaywi was in high school in Jordan, he had a passion for finance but his prospects seemed limited. Juggling his studies, minimum-wage jobs, and family crises made it hard to envision a future where he could develop his talents and flourish in his chosen field. Through sheer perseverance he finished high school and entered university, where during the Covid pandemic in late 2020 he discovered the world of educational resources that MIT Open Learning offers. He devoured MIT OpenCourseWare courses in statistics, computer programming, and calculus, and soon realized that he could take steps toward a career in finance by enrolling in a MITx MicroMasters program. The program’s instructional team recognized Nader’s talent, and when he finished the program they offered him a position as a teaching assistant. From there, drawing on the skills he had learned but also on the online community he had become a part of, Nader was able to get jobs in his field, first working for a financial firm in Jordan, and then for companies in the US and Dubai. In this episode, we hear his inspiring story of passion and perseverance.
The Open Learners podcast is produced by Alexis Haut and hosted by Emmanuel Kasigazi and Michael Jordan Pilgreen.
Relevant Resources:
MIT MicroMasters Program in Finance
Dr. Egor Matveyev (MIT faculty page)
Prof. Andrew Lo (MIT faculty page)
Courses by Prof. Lo on MIT OpenCourseWare
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Share Your Open Learning Story
To share your own open learning story with Michael and Emmanuel, send them an email at open_learners_pod@mit.edu.
NADER AL-ETAYWI: The economics of demand and supply. If it was that easy, everybody would be doing it. It needs education. It needs passion. It needs commitment, not just motivation. You need to be motivated internally. You need to be curious about the thing that you're learning. If you're doing it just to get rich, you're going to get way bored, way before you ever actually get the opportunity to get your first paycheck.
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EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Welcome to Open Learners--
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: --a podcast that tells the stories of learners all over the world who use MIT OpenCourseWare.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: I'm Emmanuel Kasigazi, an Open Learner myself, from Kampala, Uganda, in East Africa.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: And I'm Michael Jordan Pilgreen, an Open Learner from Memphis, Tennessee.
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Hey, Emmanuel.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Hi, Michael. It's good to be back. This is our third episode. I'm very excited.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: Emmanuel, you know today's learner is Nader Al-Etaywi. Nader is from Jordan and is currently living in Dubai.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Oh, nice. And Michael, Nader is actually someone you've had the opportunity to work with outside of OCW. Can you tell us more about that?
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: Sure. I met Nader through the MicroMasters in Finance program, and I stayed in touch with him throughout that process. Once he graduated undergrad, I knew we needed someone with his quantitative skills at BondCliQ, so I recruited him to come work for me at BondCliQ.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Amazing. Because one of the reasons we wanted to start this podcast was to showcase that OCW has the potential to be more than just an online learning platform. It is a tool to build global communities, and Nader's story is a perfect example to include in our first season because it does exactly that.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: Exactly. I think the power of the internet and MIT OpenCourseWare is that super power of networking to connect with people all over the world unlike you. And before even getting his current internship, Nader was already following a really inspiring path.
He's been passionate about finance since he was a teenager, but some life circumstances prevented him from really diving into his studies before he discovered in MIT's Open Learning resources. He started OpenCourseWare in 2020 at home in Jordan, while he was struggling to balance high school with 19 hour shifts at a falafel restaurant.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: That's dedication. In the four years since he started his Open Learner's journey, Nader has completed the MicroMasters in finance, he has taken a number of courses in topics like statistics, coding, programming, calculus-- I mean, it's just amazing. MIT OCW and MIT MicroMasters are both Open Learning programs from MIT, but they are quite different and complementary to each other.
So with OCW, a learner has access to materials from thousands and thousands of MIT courses for self-paced learning across just about any discipline, all free, all online. I've used some of these resources myself. They're amazing. So when a learner wants to focus specifically on getting a professional and academic credential in a hot topic that they like, say, finance, say, tech, then there you can take a sequence of online courses through the MITx MicroMasters program to get that credential that you're looking for.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: Yeah, Nader is super impressive. I'll let Nader tell the rest of his story himself, but I will say he finds himself in a completely different place from where he started, so let's get into it. Here is our conversation with Nader Al-Etaywi from Jordan.
NADER AL-ETAYWI: So I'm Nader. I'm from Jordan. I'm 23 years old. I started my education journey and passion for my career, which is finance, when I was about 15. I used to watch random YouTube videos about Warren Buffett and how he invests and stuff like that.
And then when I was going through high school, I just had a bit of trouble finishing it due to circumstances at home and financial issues. So I was actually working a couple of different jobs, minimum wage jobs, restaurant, stuff like that.
Then as soon as I finished high school, while I was working those jobs, I got into university. And as soon as I got into university, I started discovering the various platforms that MIT has to endorse open and free education across the globe.
So that would be in, I think, September of 2020 during the pandemic. And I found first MIT and edX. I found the MicroMasters program in finance, and I found OCW, MIT OpenCourseWare. And I started delving into a lot of various topics-- calculus, statistics, finance.
The most special thing for me about the MicroMasters program and the community that it fosters online is that you get to meet students from all around the world who have the same passion as you, who's trying to learn the same essential skill that you are trying to learn.
Every week, I would meet someone. We'd chat up online, and the friend list that I made throughout that program continued to grow. And some of them, I met in person. Some of them, I'm yet to meet in person, like you, Mike and Emmanuel.
And after I finished that program, I became a teaching assistant and interacted more with a lot of the students at the MIT, community teaching assistant for the MicroMasters program. And that's when opportunities started coming in.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: All right. Let me ask one question just to get us contextualized within your journey. You said you started finding these resources around September 2020, that year during the pandemic. Where were you? What were you thinking about? What was your daily life like at that point in time?
NADER AL-ETAYWI: I would wake up at 5:00 AM, go to my job in the falafel restaurant at 6:00, and work for nine, 10 hours a day. And I was slowly doing high school at the time. And once I finished, I had a bit of free time. I quit my job, and I decided that I want to focus on my education. So I was free.
I had a couple of months before my bachelor's started in September or October, around the same time that I started the MicroMasters program. It felt advanced. It's graduate level, and I didn't even enter my bachelor's, and I had problems with my high school. So I wasn't confident that I would be able to finish the program.
But thankfully after 10, 20, 30 hours a week of studying for MIT exams, I was lucky enough to finish the program, and that really helped me gain a lot of confidence in my skills and abilities. And it helped me in my undergraduate studies and helped me in other finance specific programs, such as CFA and FRM.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: Going from just graduating high school to tackling graduate level work is no small feat. If you feel comfortable sharing, what were some of the obstacles or problems you were having during your high school education that you were able to overcome?
NADER AL-ETAYWI: Yeah, it definitely was. And at the time, my confidence, as I said, was too low. And the biggest problem I had was-- a lot of it was family issues. My dad had lost his business. We had to sell our house and find a new one. He went bankrupt, unfortunately. And that just caused a lot of stress and havoc in my personal life.
So I became just a little bit isolated, trying to work so I can be able to support myself and my family. I didn't have the mental capacity to focus on high school. Plus, when you put it in normal context of-- yeah, this is high school. You gotta finish these topics and pass those courses.
It was pretty boring. I wasn't interested in it, really. But when I started studying for MIT, it seemed like this out of world, higher class education, worldwide, graduate level course that's really intensive and really hard. It aligned with my passion, my curiosity, and I was able to push through that hard work.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: All this happened September 2020 with the lockdown. I would like to touch a bit about that. I guess what I want to know is, how were you as a human being and your interactions and the people around you changed when your life before you met OCW and the resources and then your life after, how you interact with the environment, the people around you, your family, close friends?
NADER AL-ETAYWI: Throughout my whole life, I had just a lot of free time that I would waste on average stuff, Netflix shows, movies, playing games, and stuff like that. But when I started the program, I was like, whoa, wait. Wait a minute. This material is very hard. This material is very engaging.
And it was during lockdown, so everyone was already staying home. There was not much to do outside of home, which was a blessing, honestly, in my case. All of that time home and isolation from my environment and friends and family that was already happening in place, I put that time and dedication into just finishing that program.
And because of how hard the program was and how challenging it was, the reward-- once you finish a quiz or a problem set, and you hit that check button, and you get the green mark-- it was very gratifying. It was very rewarding. Seeking knowledge and just the gratification of learning new things became an essential core part of my personality.
Now, all I want to do is just stay at home, stay home, stay on my laptop, continue learning stuff online, and gain new skills and gain new-- so maybe there was already a lot of isolation going on in the world. And that has helped me gain discipline to my career, to my education, and to the things I want to accomplish.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: Did that discipline that you cultivated over this learning journey translate into other aspects of your life? Did it inspire others in your close circle? Did you even talk about it with people in your close circle, or was it more just an online thing?
NADER AL-ETAYWI: Oh, yeah. Now, my friends can't hear enough about-- they've had enough about my MIT passion and story and journey. I don't shut up about it. There was a lot of people that I've talked to on the program, some people that reached out to me randomly on LinkedIn, on the internet after seeing these certificates, and they would have a bunch of questions.
And we'd hop on a call, and we'd talk about the program. And a lot of my personal friends as well, and people I met in uni started taking the MicroMasters in finance specifically. And they would go through the courses, and they'd update me on their progress. And it changed me. It changed a lot of people around me who are interested in finance.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: Was there any instructors that really inspired you in the programming? And if they did, why? Who were the professors, and why did they inspire you?
NADER AL-ETAYWI: All of the professors on that program were great, and they were awe inspiring, and they all had their own unique way of teaching. But my favorite was Professor Egor Matveyev. It was the first course I was starting. It even started a little bit before my bachelor's. It was graduate level, and I would do the lectures, and they would seem very, very, very hard.
But then there was like a recitation section after each week and chapter where Professor Egor Matveyev would start from the very basic blocks of math and the equations and finance, and we would build up more complex exercises as we go in the journey. So just those recitations, and I probably wouldn't have passed the first few courses without them and how simple he made them seem.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: Did you ever imagine that you would get this type of educational experience from-- I'm presuming-- your living room? I don't know where you studied. How did open educational resources not only change your trajectory, but how you think about access and opportunity globally? Where do you see it going in the future?
NADER AL-ETAYWI: Yeah. Well, it really democratized education. Just for me, from Jordan, working minimum wage job in a country that is not doing great economically, I had access to the best education in the whole world. And that education that I got manifested in me getting jobs and working remotely with companies in New York or Arizona or in Jordan or in Dubai.
So now, we're in a much more global atmosphere where, after also COVID happened, work started being remote, and people started being more collaborative online. So I think anyone with a phone and an internet connection and a passion now can just pick up the resources that MIT and the plenty of available online education in general, resources that are free on the internet, and learn any skill you want.
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EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: You mentioned finance a lot. Do you have a love for finance naturally? Or it's just something-- it's where the money is. It's what I'm going to do.
NADER AL-ETAYWI: It's definitely where the money is.
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But my passion for finance started when I was 15. I was just always curious about how financial markets function, how the global economy can function. When I was six or whatever, whenever I would get like a huge bag of chips, I would sell it to my friends at school or siblings. I was always just interested in business in general, especially finance and learning about the global economy.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Yeah, that's a nice one. I was like that once. I used to sell sweets to my classmates.
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So I understand. So you were specifically looking for finance things when you phoned OCW.
NADER AL-ETAYWI: Yep.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: And ever since then, have you taken anything out of your circles, maybe something outside finance?
NADER AL-ETAYWI: Yeah, definitely. I did a lot of calculus. I did a lot of probability and statistics, programming, Python, and just other skills. Because I want to become a quant, I had to learn everything about technology, learn everything about finance, and mix them together. And MIT was the perfect place to do that, because no other university in my country had that kind of wide range of offerings where you can choose in one degree all of these different topics that I wanted to study.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Nice. So what are the things you've studied? I know I personally have said a lot I would take. The most impactful for me, I think, were the AI lectures I've watched. What would you say, first of all, is the most impactful, and then the one that. Kind of had the most impact in the real life? Like when I took this course, this qualification is when I went down the path I'm on now.
NADER AL-ETAYWI: I think the course is Modern Financial Theory by Professor Andrew Lu. I enrolled in the MicroMasters program, but just before it had started, I thought I would prepare myself with that course.
During that course, during the time that they were filming those lectures, the big financial crisis was happening in real time, so we'd see a lot of meaningful interactions from the students that were taking the course and Professor Andrew Lu and all of the specific questions they would ask during that period. It was such a coincidence, a very maybe happy or lucky coincidence that they started following the course just when the financial crisis was happening.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: So how did you end up in the finance internship?
NADER AL-ETAYWI: So the first job I got as a quantitative analyst was with a startup in Jordan, and it was actually in my second year of bachelors, just when I finished the MIT program, and after a bit of time of being a community teaching assistant. I worked with them for around six months, building models for crypto trading.
And after that, I met Mike, and he introduced me to an opportunity with a company that works in New York and in Wall Street and the bond market. It took a couple of months of preparation and courses and education that Mike suggested. And after I finished those, that's how I landed my current internship.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: Yeah. And that was a lot kinder than the actual journey.
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You ended up graduating during that time from your undergrad. My previous role was at a financial technology startup primarily focused on consolidating corporate bond information. Nader had been a standout student and teacher associate. Is that what they called it?
NADER AL-ETAYWI: Teaching assistant.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: Teaching assistant. Teaching assistant in the MicroMasters program. We both started, I think, at the same time, both September 2020, so we were the same cohort of MicroMasters students. As some of you may know, that's when I got my job at the financial technology startup.
So my coursework fell off because it became real life work for me. I didn't end up passing a single course, I don't think, in that MicroMasters. Meanwhile, Nader had been killing every single one. We would touch base every three months for a little while there. And then once he graduated, that was kind of when the program really opened up for him, when he started working for us and solving some of these hard problems.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Nice. You mentioned something about people and how among the best things that OCW enabled you to access or to do was connect with all these people from around the world. And you have an actual testimony.
Yo connected with someone, a fellow learner, who-- that led to an internship. I would like you to touch a bit about-- you've met all these great people. You've got an internship out of it. You're in Dubai. But I want you to use your own words and paint for us your life after OCW.
NADER AL-ETAYWI: A huge portion of my life is owed to OCW as well. I did a lot of programs, not just MicroMasters and finance. I did FRM part one, I did the CFA level one, and I did all of those with my bachelors sometime while working as a quant-- and one time in real estate even-- under three years.
I didn't even know about FRM or CFA. I didn't even know what skills I need to learn. I didn't know about big data and how to do data analytics and data engineering and PySpark and all of these things. So the people that I met had all kind of different careers. Some of them were biologists. Some of them were physicists. Some of them were senior vice presidents at major insurance companies and quants, and some of them had already had PhDs.
And just meeting those people and having those conversations is what broadened my vision. I learned what I need to learn through the conversations that I've had, through the people that I connected with at MIT. It wasn't just about-- the material is all there. You can learn anything online, but you need to know what to learn in order to be successful.
And it wasn't just like someone telling me that this program is great, and I would go do it. I have a friend, for example. His name is Devin. We studied together FRM and CFA. Every single chapter, we would hop on a Zoom call, and we would spend six hours together solving questions and learning stuff.
We did that for the MicroMasters. We did that for CFA. We did that FRM. And I had many more friends that I had the pleasure of studying with and collaborating with, so wouldn't have done it alone without the people and the community and the friendships that I have made that allowed me to survive this very challenging program and education journey.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: That's really beautiful to think about that. Not only were you getting open educational resources by coursework material, but you were getting access to a social capital that you could tap in, that you could leverage. You could leverage an executive's experience just because he's your classmate, or she's your classmate, right? That really is a beautiful thing. We asked this question of everyone that comes on the podcast, and it was a question from Curt Newton, the director of OpenCourseWare. If you had a magic wand, what would you add to OpenCourseWare? What would you add to the MicroMasters programs, any open educational resources?
NADER AL-ETAYWI: Well, I would add the whole degree of finance, all of the curriculum, doing it online, I would do it. There is some applications in the program where you actually apply the theory and do regression and do what you learned in the class. More applied courses would be more appreciated, and specifically, courses that are centered around collaboration.
I've met a lot of students that went through six or nine months of the program, and they've never been on a Zoom call with another student, with a peer student. They didn't network. So just maybe designing a program centered around collaboration would be a huge plus, because I had an amazing experience at MIT.
I think I made the most out of it. There's still more to learn and make more out of it, but a lot of students just didn't focus on socializing or didn't get the social experience that I've had. They just went in, opened the course, understood the material, did the quizzes and exams, and they left out. It's not bad to do that, but I think it's more valuable to just increase the human touch, the human connection element.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: That's really beautiful. Do you have anything, any message that you would want to share with your friends, your family, the world around you?
NADER AL-ETAYWI: If you have a dream, just give it time. Stay dedicated. Stay passionate. Don't let your passion die out. Don't get burned out. Don't be too hard on yourself. Don't get turned down. Don't have doubts. Over the long run, if you really just put the time, put the effort in, you will make your dreams come true. And you just need to get out there and show up every day.
If you show up every day, and if you do a little bit of work on your dream, with enough time, it's more than just a possibility to make it true. That's what happened with me here. I remember dreaming of becoming a quantitative analyst on my LinkedIn bio when I just started out university three, four years ago. And I thought, it's a silly dream, that I would never achieve it. But here I am being a quant in the finance industry.
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EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Wow. That was a full circle conversation. We followed Nader from the start of his OCW journey as a struggling high school student deep into his career as a quant analyst. Pretty amazing, if you ask me. From all this, what's your biggest takeaway from this conversation?
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: I think my biggest takeaway is exactly what Nader said in the last answer to the question. If you have a dream, give it time. Stay dedicated. Stay passionate. Don't let your passion die out, and just keep pursuing it until you achieve it.
EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: I concur. I concur. My biggest takeaway from all this is anyone can achieve this. We're hearing a story of someone who started out all the way from Jordan, didn't have much going for them, but they stayed dedicated, putting in hours, working insane hours at a restaurant, but still having time to come back and do all these resources, put in the time, put in the work, and it later paid off.
You have someone from across the nation ending up working for a company that is across the seas in another continent and is now living in a different place. That is the power of what OCW gives you. That's the power of the community and the internet, to know that you can do it. No matter where you're from, no matter where you start, you can access anyone on this planet from any corner of it, and it's possible. And OCW is giving everyone that power and that opportunity.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: And I want to say thanks to everyone for tuning in to our conversation with Nader. We will be back in two weeks with another story from a different learner in the global OpenCourseWare community. See you then.
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EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: Open Learners is produced by Alexis Haut. Special thanks to the supporters and donors who make OCW possible.
MICHAEL JORDAN PILGREEN: To learn more about MIT's OpenCourseWare and to check out the courses mentioned in this episode, visit the OpenCourseWare website at ocw.mit.edu.
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