Stories that shape us – Pingping Guan

When Pingping Guan decided to join the Social Mobility pillar at WIBF, it wasn’t a sudden decision. It was the culmination of a career that had taken an unexpected turn, shaped by curiosity, practical necessity and a desire to help others navigate similar crossroads.

A plot twist in career direction

Pingping’s story begins with a PhD in computational chemistry. Like many doctoral graduates, she faced a narrowing set of career options. The traditional academic route, postdoctoral research followed by a lectureship, felt increasingly uncertain. Pharmaceutical companies were scaling back recruitment as clinical trials became more expensive, while the machine learning research she was conducting, although innovative, was still far from mainstream. Academic life itself seemed precarious: a series of three-year postdoctoral contracts, each dependent on securing the next grant and the next temporary position.

As she reflected during our conversation, “I wanted to see what it’s like outside the university.”

Having spent her entire life in education, first as a student and then as a researcher, she realised she had little understanding of the wider world of work.

A chance conversation that changed everything

The turning point came through a casual conversation with her flatmate, another PhD student facing similar uncertainties. Her flatmate mentioned knowing someone studying astrophysics who was applying for roles in finance. On the surface, the suggestion seemed absurd. Computational chemistry and astrophysics have little obvious connection to quantitative finance. Yet the idea intrigued Pingping enough to investigate.

What followed was characteristic of her approach: teaching herself an entirely new discipline. She bought John Hull’s Options, Futures and Other Derivatives, the definitive textbook on quantitative finance, and spent hours in a Waterstones bookshop in central London trying to understand the fundamentals. At that point, her knowledge of finance extended little further than discovering that “call” and “put” meant something very different from their everyday use.

From those first tentative steps, Pingping taught herself quantitative finance and successfully made the leap from academia into the financial sector.

Why social mobility matters to her

Understanding Pingping’s own career transition explains why social mobility is so important to her. Her journey required intellectual curiosity, the confidence to begin again in a completely new field and, perhaps most importantly, exposure to opportunities that simply weren’t visible within the academic world she knew.

Her family background also shaped this perspective. Her grandfather was a doctor in rural China who provided semi-voluntary medical care to farmers, often accepting payment in kind or postponing payment altogether. Her parents were both teachers who took unconventional routes to higher education. Her father graduated just as the Cultural Revolution came to an end, while her mother was sent to the countryside before later completing her degree through an alternative route.

Growing up with those stories gave Pingping an appreciation of how circumstances can limit opportunities, but also how access to information, education and support can change the course of someone’s life.

Seeing her daughter’s future

Today, Pingping lives in London with her eleven-year-old daughter, who attends the City of London School. When her daughter recently asked when she had decided on her own career, Pingping’s honest answer was around the age of 15 or 16. But the conversation also made her realise that, like many young people, her daughter had only a limited understanding of the range of careers available to her.

That is why programmes such as Career Ready and Making the Leap matter so much. Young people cannot aspire to careers they have never encountered. Insight days, mentoring and meeting professionals from different industries help broaden horizons and make possibilities tangible. Without that exposure, talented students often make life-changing decisions based only on the opportunities they know about, just as Pingping herself might have remained in academia had she not had that chance conversation with her flatmate.

Contributing to systemic change

By volunteering with WIBF’s Social Mobility pillar, Pingping is helping ensure that the next generation has the information, exposure and confidence to make informed career choices.

Her story shows that social mobility is about far more than opening doors for disadvantaged young people. It is about widening horizons, challenging assumptions and helping talented people discover opportunities they may never have realised existed.

Her own transition from computational chemistry to finance required courage, resilience and a willingness to start again. Today, she is using that experience to help others find their own unexpected path forward.