Reflections from a Graduating Jacobs Scholar: Q&A with Harry Kong

As you reflect on your time at Wharton, how has the experience of being named a Jacobs Scholar shaped your MBA journey?

Being named a Jacobs Scholar was a defining moment of my Wharton experience. I came to the MBA from four years in energy transition investing at Macquarie, where I was underwriting utility-scale solar, wind, storage, and renewable fuel projects. The work was deeply quantitative and fundamental—building discounted cash flow models around merchant power curves, capacity factors, tax equity structures—but I hadn’t yet connected that practitioner toolkit to the academic foundations of quantitative finance. The Jacobs Scholar designation gave me both the recognition and the intellectual community to make that connection explicit.

What I valued most was the cohort itself. Being part of a group of students who take quantitative methods seriously—and who come at them from very different angles—sharpened how I think about my own work. It also connected me directly with Dr. Jacobs, whose career demonstrates that rigorous quantitative research and real-world investment management aren’t separate pursuits. That perspective reinforced the direction I’ve taken at Wharton: building a bridge between the energy markets I know well and the public markets analytical frameworks I came here to develop.

What initially sparked your interest in quantitative finance, and how did that interest evolve during your time in the program?

My interest started in the field. At Macquarie, I was pricing infrastructure assets whose cash flows depend on wholesale electricity prices, weather variability, regulatory incentives, and technology cost curves—all of which require quantitative modeling to underwrite with any rigor. I realized I was doing quantitative finance in practice without calling it that. Coming to Wharton, I wanted to formalize and extend that foundation.

The Quantitative Finance major gave me the structure to do exactly that. Professor Jules van Binsbergen’s work measuring the skill of investment managers reshaped how I think about where returns actually come from—a question that matters deeply when you’re evaluating infrastructure alongside traditional securities. Professor Kevin Kaiser’s approach to value creation, investor activism, and alternative investments pushed me to think more critically about how private and public market frameworks can complement each other. I also audited Professor Andrew Huemmler’s Energy Systems and Policy course at Penn Engineering, which let me stress-test my practitioner intuitions against formal models of power market design. That cross-campus experience is something I wouldn’t have anticipated before Wharton, and it’s been one of the most intellectually rewarding parts of my time here.

How has being a Jacobs Scholar influenced your goals or perspective on your career path?

The Jacobs Scholars program crystallized something I‘d been circling for a while: The most compelling opportunities in finance sit at the intersection of deep sector expertise and rigorous quantitative analysis. My background is in energy and infrastructure private equity: I spent four years at Macquarie investing in the physical assets that underpin the energy transition. At Wharton, the Jacobs Scholars community and the Quantitative Finance curriculum showed me how to apply that same analytical intensity to public markets, where the energy transition is now one of the most significant capital reallocation stories of our generation.

I’m heading into a career that combines both—leveraging my infrastructure and energy transition background in a public markets context. The Jacobs Scholars program gave me the confidence and the intellectual toolkit to pursue that path rather than defaulting back to a familiar seat. More broadly, it reinforced my belief that quantitative finance isn’t just a methodology; it’s a way of thinking critically about markets, and it’s most powerful when paired with genuine domain knowledge.

What advice would you share with future Jacobs Scholars and MBA candidates interested in quantitative finance?

Don’t treat the Quantitative Finance major as a credential—treat it as a lens. The coursework is rigorous and the technical skills matter, but the real value is in learning to ask better questions about how markets work and where value is mispriced. During my time at Wharton, I had the chance to sit down with Howard Marks in a small-group session, and something he said stuck with me: quantitative finance is a tool, but what ultimately differentiates great investors is judgment. The models sharpen your thinking—they don’t replace it. That framing has shaped how I approach everything from coursework to career decisions.

My other piece of advice is to take full advantage of Wharton’s breadth. Some of my most formative experiences came from outside the Finance Department—serving as co-president of the Wharton Investment Management Club, auditing courses in real estate, and building relationships with faculty whose work doesn’t neatly fit into one box. The Jacobs Scholars community itself is a microcosm of this: The students come from different industries and bring different quantitative traditions, and the conversations that happen at that intersection are where the real learning happens. Lean into that.