Discovering talent

They would watch how table tennis professionals would put heavy forward spin on their drives, prompting ping pong balls to suddenly curve downward at the end of their flight path, abruptly hit the edge of the table, and jump forward, keeping their opponents on the defensive. That fascination eventually led them to link a training machine with a computer, helping the aspiring physicists to understand and simulate the curve of the flying ball. They discovered that, with enough topspin, you could theoretically even get a ping pong ball to loop. They also used their results, with the help of professional footballers, to create a perfect formula for curved free kicks, helping to make them one of the winning teams of the EU's 2006 Contest for Young Scientists.

"Spin" is an important topic in aerodynamics: it is also an important concept in particle physics. When Pratibha ­Vikas, who currently works in UBS's risk area, first arrived in Switzerland as a young 22-year old, she had much of Johannes and Alexander's curiosity. Trained as a physicist and computer scientist in her native India, she was interested in the study of subatomic particles – bits that make up atoms and form the basic building blocks of ­nature.

This interest brought her to CERN, the world's largest particle physics center. Founded in 1954 near Geneva, its scientists and researchers have been using a series of ever-larger and more powerful accelerators and colliders to get a better understanding of matter. For Vikas, a young graduate student pursuing a doctorate in physics, it was ideal. CERN's machines accelerate particles to near light speeds, crash them, and record the results of each collision in detail. After that, sophisticated software reconstructs the collisions for further analysis.

"When I arrived at CERN," Vikas explains, "they were putting the finishing touches on the Large Electron-Positron collider, also known as the LEP. This was basically a huge circular vacuum chamber, 27 kilometers in circumference, buried underground on the Swiss-French border."

When the LEP was built, it was the largest civil engineering project in the history of Europe, and the most powerful such accelerator ever built.

"Although at CERN I had gained a lot of experience doing different things," she says, "from coordinating teams of researchers, to writing software which helped analyze the data, to designing detectors, to crawling in the LEP tunnel pulling cables, I realized that I wanted to use my skills elsewhere. So I started looking for opportunities outside of physics."

She found just what she was looking for in the world of finance. A friend, also an ex-physicist, gave her resume to UBS, and soon after, she was offered a job. "There are actually a lot of areas of banking where analytical experience is important. At the same time, it's very much a people business. For me, this was exactly the mix I was looking for," she says.

Vikas says she has purposely avoided technical jobs at UBS, opting instead for the more people-oriented field of project management. Her previous experience has been valuable, however, in allowing her to understand the technical aspects of finance and IT needed for her projects. "Considering my training as a scientist, I was used to immersing myself in complex subject matter. I was impressed, however, by how much the bank was willing to invest in helping me get up to speed. For example, while I had planned to take some banking courses on my own, UBS instead paid for me to do the executive program at the Swiss Banking School. This greatly broadened my ­horizons. I could learn about the whole spectrum of banking, about what people ­really do in their jobs."

This formal training was supplemented by mentoring inside the organization – "learning the ropes" from her colleagues – as well as self study and on-the-job experience.

"My first job was in the risk management area as a business analyst / project manager for the Group credit risk control data warehouse," she relates. "This involved learning about credit and country risk and how they are managed. I had to learn how risks are quantified for different products, what the risk mitigants are, and how they are reported and controlled. As we were consolidating and calculating credit and country risk figures for all of UBS, I also needed a deep understanding of the credit risk control ­systems in place across the firm."

It was very reminiscent of her physicist days, she says: "It's really all about gathering, organizing and evaluating a great deal of data. They do a lot of mathematical modeling in risk control, and that's something I was already very familiar with."

Since then she's moved on to work on UBS's effort to implement the revised capital adequacy framework set out by Basel II. "I had learned a lot about credit risk, and they needed someone with that knowledge," she says.

But after CERN, can working in a bank really be satisfying? "Definitely," Vikas says. "I find finance and economics fascinating, and there is plenty of analytical work to do. But here I also get to work with a great deal of people from a diverse set of backgrounds, which has its own challenges. In fact from that perspective, I'd even say it's more challenging than physics."