Undergraduate Philip Mitreski’s work has been showcased around the globe
At just 19 years old, Philip Mitreski has already accomplished so much.
The business major with a concentration in accounting/finance always seems to be ahead of the curve. He’s on pace to graduate college a year and a half early. He’s traveled across the country and around the world presenting his research. He’s had three first-author papers appear in peer-reviewed and ranked journals.
Former Indiana University Northwest Business Professor Matthew Lutey said Mitreski is probably the only undergraduate who can say they’ve done that — perhaps ever.
And while he’s accomplished so much already, he feels his research on uranium and wealth management firms will be important in the future and set him even further apart.
“I’m focused on a specialized niche,” Mitreski said. “It’s more or less my personal anticipation of what the future economic needs of the United States might be because I think having expertise, specifically on renewable energy and nuclear energy is going to become very important in the next decade or so.”
How uranium meets business
It might seem strange for a business student who wants to be an investment banker to focus on uranium. But Mitreski, as is the case for most things, has a reason.
The Crown Point native attended IU Bloomington’s Kelley School of Business during his first semester of college. There, he did a Case Competition where the goal was to analyze and pitch a stock with the biggest upside.
Mitreski picked Cameco Corporation, one of the largest global providers of uranium for energy. His team lost the competition “badly,” as he put it. Turns out Mitreski was right on the money when evaluating the company.
“The funny part is the judge ended up being completely wrong,” Mitreski said. “My valuation for the company ended up being within 3%. … That kind of led me into uranium specifically.”
Mitreski’s first paper, “The Structural Importance of Uranium: Commodity Volatility and Sustainability,” has been invited to be published in the Journal of Business and Behavioral Science, showed how the fluctuations in the spot price of uranium had an outsized impact on the price of energy as measured by the General Energy Index. He even put together a database with over 700 publicly known nuclear reactors (both commissioned and decommissioned).
In March, Mitreski, accompanied by Lutey, attended the American Society of Business and Behavioral Sciences Conference in Los Angeles, where Mitreski won the best paper award.
And Mitreski’s impressive resume continued to grow. He wrote two additional papers — one expanding on his uranium research and another on wealth management — published in the Journal of International Finance and Economics and the Journal of the Academy of Business and Economics, respectively, and flew out to present both at the International Academy of Business and Economics Conference in Hanoi, Vietnam.
He also recently completed a two-month internship in Washington, D.C., working alongside Arizona congresswoman Debbie Lesko and energy advisor Lou Hrkman aiding in policy decisions by predicting the impact potential policy decisions could have on energy prices.
Wherever he goes, Mitreski is often the youngest person in the room.
“I’ve been working full-time in the corporate environment and interacting with people who are more qualified and intelligent than me,” Mitreski said. “It’s been fun and has allowed me to develop myself even further.”
A future built on energy
It takes a lot of time and effort to produce Mitreski’s level of research — he sometimes spends months on a single paper.
Late nights and weekends have been dedicated to researching, writing and teaching himself new skills, like coding, to build model forecasts and databases.
“Philip is a remarkable student with ambitions of going into investment banking or academia,” Lutey said. “He’s also interested in joining a PhD program in economics, math or finance at schools like MIT, Harvard or the University of Southern California. I think he will go on to achieve great success.”
While Mitreski is still looking for an opportunity to break into the competitive world of investment baking, he knows the skills he’s learned researching and presenting will help him in the future.
“If I want my research to be valuable, I have to understand how to take these concepts and simplify them for an audience who’s not going to be as intimate with the work I have done,” Mitreski said. “… I have to convey a lot of really complex factors to a client in a way that’s rather concise.”
“Being able to take that, chop it up, cut it down and repeat it to an audience that isn’t going to be technically knowledgeable has been a huge benefit I gained.”
And while most of his research has been on his own, Mitreski is thankful to IU Northwest for connecting him with Dr. Lutey, who’s been able to provide feedback and get his work noticed.
“Dr. Lutey is probably the most important person I’ve met in university,” Mitreski said. “… an enormous amount of credit goes to him and all the help that he’s given me in preparing for conferences and even pursuing a doctorate.
“Without him, none of this would’ve ever happened.”
If you couldn’t already tell, Mitreski isn’t one to sit still or stop thinking. That’s why he’s drawn to investment banking and all the pressure, late nights and excitement that come with it.
But even with all he’s achieved at a young age, Mitreski is waiting for his opportunity. He doesn’t know what the future holds, but he has a plan, whether it’s getting an internship opportunity in investment banking, furthering his education at the graduate level or staying at IU Northwest while working on a statistical model for unemployment data.
“I’ve got a lot of different paths I’m looking at,” Mitreski said. “I’ve been networking quite a bit, so I’m going to try and tap into that right now. I can’t give a definitive answer right now.”
