Modeling the Future
As an undergraduate majoring in mathematics and economics at USC Dornsife, Albert Lee tutored some of USC’s best known athletes, including Olympian volleyball players Nick Becker and Brian Ivie, and NFL quarterback Todd Marinovich and offensive tackle Tony Boselli. The experience, Lee said, was instrumental in helping him build his successful consulting firm, Summit, based in Washington, D.C.
An expert in econometric modeling and statistical sampling, Lee founded his company in 2003. Summit now has close to 80 employees and specializes in quantitative consulting, mostly for federal government agencies. Its staff of economists, econometricians and research scientists use rigorous numerical techniques to model risk, evaluate programs and predict future performance.
“In many ways, tutoring athletes wasn’t very different from what I do right now,” Lee said. “Consulting is a lot like teaching. I tell my staff, ‘In teaching, when students don’t get it, it’s their problem. In consulting, when clients don’t get it, it’s your problem.’ You have to figure out a way to make the idea comprehensible to your audience.”
Lee, who earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics from USC Dornsife in 1991, returned to University Park campus on Oct. 16 to talk to math students about his own career path.
In addition to his work at Summit, he also teaches econometrics — the application of mathematics, statistical methods and computer science to economic data — at Columbia University in New York City and has lectured on graduate- and undergraduate-level economics, statistics and econometrics at UCLA and George Washington University. Lee said he was grateful he had that opportunity to tutor student athletes while at USC Dornsife.
“First, it gave me an appreciation of student athletes’ tremendous work ethic. Second, it gave me an opportunity to talk about my craft, which I’m passionate about. And third, it taught me how to explain a complex idea and make it understandable.”
The secret, Lee said, was to take the student’s perspective — a strategy he now applies to his clients. “Then you’re successful. Force feeding is no good,” he added with a laugh.
A long journey
Born in Hong Kong to two entrepreneurs with manufacturing plants in China, Lee made many trips to the United States before finally settling in New York City with his family at age 14.
He was inspired to come to USC after meeting the son of a partner at his aunt’s New York law firm who was attending USC Dornsife.
There, Lee found inspiration in the high quality of the teaching, in particular that of the late Dennis Estes, professor of mathematics.
“Math was a small department with small classes. At that time I was very interested in abstract algebra, and Professor Estes was an algebraist,” Lee said. “He thought I was smart. I was certainly young. In my junior year I went up to him and said, ‘Why don’t we write a paper together?’ The miracle was not only that he didn’t rebuff me, but that he got me a $500 grant that summer — enough to pay for gas for me to come down twice a week and scribble equations with him on a chalkboard.”
The second “miracle” was that their resulting paper was published in a journal called the Nova Journal of Algebra and Geometry.
“It’s personal touches like this that make USC Dornsife so fantastic,” Lee said.
Building a brand
After graduating, Lee earned a doctorate in economics from UCLA and joined accountancy firm KPMG, where he supervised projects involving financial modeling and statistical sampling for financial audits. He then moved to litigation consulting shop Bates White LLC, where he used economics and statistics to quantify damage amounts in litigation cases. He was five years into his professional career when he decided to launch his own consulting company.
Summit’s first client was the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and Lee’s first task was to create a financially predictive model that would accurately score the bankruptcy likelihood of each multifamily mortgage loan insured by the FHA.
From that successful first project, Lee built his company one client and one employee at a time. Today, 12 years later, Summit has between 30 and 40 active projects with a diverse list of clients including the Department of Labor, the Federal Housing Financial Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs and Small Business Administration. For the Department of the Treasury — a client for the last three years — Lee and his team use an econometric model to understand the frequency and likelihood of cash flow in order to estimate the Treasury’s monthly cash needs for the U.S. for the next five years. He described the project as being similar to “balancing the future checkbook for the U.S.”
“From one small project we built our brand,” Lee said. “I think that’s very important.”
Don’t be afraid to speak up
Lee advised students to learn everything they are supposed to learn, because otherwise, he said, it will come back to haunt you. Second, be who you are and do what you love, and third, be true to it.
Lee also advised students to speak up.
“In the information economy, your opinions matter,” he said. “You might be coming to the problem with a different perspective. And sometimes that’s exactly what an organization needs.”
A firm believer in paying it forward, Lee admitted he particularly likes to employ interns from his alma mater.
“I like to have USC interns because I know the university trains good students,” Lee said. “Plus, I think the camaraderie and the loyalty they share is fantastic.”
Twenty-four years after graduating, Lee has clearly lost none of his passion for mathematics.
“Math is an international language that bridges generations and cultures,” he said.
“It imparts incredible clarity and precision to thinking and communication and allows me to understand technical literature across many fields, including economics, statistics and computational science.”
“And math makes a fantastic living” he said. “Sometimes I sit at my desk and chuckle because I cannot believe that people pay me money to read math papers.”