SIPA Alum Anthony Tokarz on Building a Career in Finance and Geopolitics Post-SIPA

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Anthony Tokarz MIA ’25 is a geo-economist working at the intersection of finance and defense technology. At SIPA, Tokarz found coursework geared toward future policymakers that spanned international finance, cyber strategy, and global politics. Now working in defense tech, he applies SIPA’s interdisciplinary training to model risk and decision-making in an increasingly complex world.

What drew you to SIPA, and what were you hoping to gain from the program when you first arrived?

My family is from Poland, where questions of territorial dispute and political resistance were top of mind. And so that got me very interested in European geopolitics. But as I began to gain international exposure, like traveling to Ethiopia weeks before the 2020 Ethiopian Civil War and working with refugees from Myanmar, I became obsessed with the fragility of institutions. It became very clear to me how fragile and dangerous things could be in an instant.

What led me to SIPA was my desire to be in a space where I was among practitioners rather than pure academics. Something that really frustrates me is that you have these really smart people, but they don’t understand constraints, incentives, and institutional politics. When that risk builds up over time, they become weighed down, and then that fragility emerges into the open. I wanted to be around people who had built experience in managing some of these realities. We can read the theory, we can do the academic research, but I want to know when the rubber hits the road, what do I actually need to know? And SIPA is by far the best at that.

Were there particular courses or professors that had a lasting impact on your professional trajectory?

Before entering SIPA, I knew I wanted to focus on the economic angle, because economics is the language of politics. The international finance concentration was fantastic, because I got to take my core classes in international relations (IR), but I also had the opportunity to work with, for instance, the former finance minister of Argentina, Martín Guzmán. His class, Sovereign Debt and Power Dynamics, showed me how politics affects economics in ways most people underappreciate.

I also worked closely with Professor Howard Apsan as his reader in his Sustainability Management course. He had a really interesting background, because he started as a computer scientist and now manages the environmental health and risk management program for the City University of New York educational system. And we talked at length about the importance of having a passion for climate advocacy. But if it doesn’t make business sense, it’s useless, and that’s really been the theme of my experience at SIPA. How do you make the theory survive contact with reality? 

The SIPA Cyber Program was my best discovery at SIPA by far. If I hadn’t done the Cyber Program, I wouldn’t have gotten the full SIPA experience. I took a bunch of cyber classes, like Foundations of Cyber Conflict with Professor Jason Healey and Greg Rattray. The experience of participating in the Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge, where students respond to a simulated cyber crisis after a major attack, was especially formative. Understanding the cyber component just tied everything together.

What extracurriculars were you involved in at SIPA?

I was involved in the Columbia European Student Association. We had a lot of great events, like meeting with Ambassador Stavros Lambrinidis. I was also the book reviews Editor for Columbia SIPA’s Journal of International Affairs (CJIA), the oldest student-run publication on international affairs. I sort of carved a niche for myself by reviewing books. At one point, we were getting a ton of book reviews, and I just decided I wanted to read all of them, message the author, and have a conversation about their research. There’s this real hunger for these academics to get their ideas out into the mainstream, but it’s difficult. Institutions, like the CJIA, can be a place that translates and fills that gap. 

Beyond my extracurriculars, I also continued to write for outlets like Responsible Statecraft, EurasiaNet, and the Weatherhead Institute’s APAC Journal. And that’s another big thing that SIPA taught me: the value of being interested, curious, and being able to connect ideas and people. I always tried to approach extracurriculars as a kind of force multiplier, bringing together people who might not otherwise connect and learning from those conversations.

Can you walk us through your career path since graduating from SIPA?

During SIPA, I did a few internships. I spent a summer in Warsaw at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and before that, I did a short-term contracting gig with a startup doing AI for election monitoring in Europe. And so, I wanted to put my background in AI and finance together. During my time in Europe, I discovered defense tech after reading about companies like Anduril and Palantir, and saw that there was a real demand for tech solutions because of the war in Ukraine. Eventually, I wanted to move back to the United States and work in a faster-paced environment. That led me to the Pallas Advisor National Security Fellowship, which was probably the best decision I made professionally. The fellowship gave me a lot of exposure to live defense tech startups, where I learned how to evaluate companies, and gave me the desire to be inside a startup.

Around the same time, I also had the opportunity to work with the John Quincy Adams Society through the Marcellus Policy Fellowship. During the fellowship, I published a report on NATO’s Bucharest Nine, which allowed me to connect my interests in finance with broader questions around NATO’s strategic posture and evolving challenges.

I ended up learning about my current company, Anadyr Horizon, by reading about AI companies on LinkedIn, cold-applying for the role, and messaging my now-boss, the CEO. At Anadyr, we use AI to model countries and people in them. On one level, we map how power flows through a system, the way you can map a river and measure aspects like the speed of the water flowing through or the water’s volume. At the same time, we also make decision clones that are digital twins of real people. We put these twins into the system to see how they would exist in a given environment. And then we use these models to run simulations, like Monte Carlo simulations, to better understand the probability of various outcomes. 

What advice would you give current SIPA students who are preparing to enter the job market?

What I realized early on was that I never liked the idea of being a generalist. It’s important, but it’s not enough. My approach was to identify a cross-cutting interest, like supply chains and economic analysis, and merge it with some kind of regional specialization, like being a Central and Eastern Europe expert. For instance, I wrote a well-received article recently on Eurasia.net about how you can predict Russian foreign policy based on its critical mineral supply chains. If you can capture two domains, you can convince employers that you’re a worthy hire. When someone follows a beaten path, there’s no signal that they can innovate and take a risk. Once you’ve combined two domains, you’re suddenly in the position to innovate regularly.