CURIOSITY APPLIED
Setting the bar high at the start — not quitting — has become an important lesson.” —Oliver Wang ’19, BS, Emory University MS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
OLIVER WANG ’19
The Power of Fundamentals Oliver Wang likes to joke that he left Beijing to avoid running the required 1,000-meter race for China’s high school entrance exam. “I ended up running three years of cross country,” he says, “so I guess I failed miserably.” Humor aside, Oliver’s decision to attend Cushing marked the beginning of something far more significant. From the moment he stepped onto the campus — greeted by an outgoing tour guide with a bright smile — he felt at ease navigating a new country and culture. What followed was an education built on vision, resilience, and fundamentals. Math has always been his strongest subject, and he placed into AP Calculus BC as a freshman. Two weeks in, overwhelmed by the pace, he dropped the course. Under the guidance of Denis Shubleka, his advisor and longtime mentor, Oliver learned to embrace
challenge and re-enrolled in the course his sophomore year. Now, as he looks back, he sees that early discomfort as pivotal. “Setting the bar high at the start — not quitting — has become an important lesson,” he says. His Cushing classes demanded independence, selflearning, and persistence — habits that would later charge his academic career. At Emory University and then at MIT, where Oliver pursued a PhD in AeroAstro focused on uncertainty quantification, those lessons resurfaced. Faced with dense research papers and abstract mathematical models that initially felt impossible to decipher, Oliver relied on the same muscle he built at Cushing: don’t quit. The result was a publication in a SIAM journal and continued research collaboration at MIT. At MIT, he also explored optimal transport, a mathematically elegant
field blending optimization, statistics, and probability theory. His strong mathematical foundation, solidified at Cushing, proved essential. Recently, however, Oliver broke his own rule and quit his program at MIT — his LinkedIn title is currently “PhD Dropout @ MIT” — to focus his passion and curiosity on real-world application. He founded a venture startup that worked to build AI-powered tools for vocational training, later pivoting to simulation data generation for scientific use cases such as weather forecasting. The insights he gained from that experience now inform his work at Northern Light Venture Capital, where he sources and evaluates new investments. “In a world moving fast, fundamentals feel slow,” Oliver reflects. “But it’s always the fundamentals that matter.”