Hi all,
I'm sorry for digging up this old thread but I thought it would make sense to post on here because the thread already has a lot of background information about me. I also apologise in advance for the long post and for asking so many questions.
Background
I’m a PhD student in computational fluid dynamics at a non-target university in the UK, and I want to apply for full-time quant research (QR) roles (not quant dev roles). I have heard that hiring for these roles starts in August and ends in January (at the latest), i.e., hiring is going on right now. However, I can’t apply to these roles just yet because I assume interviews require stats/machine learning skills, but my skills are limited to numerical methods (finite difference/volume) and
C++/GPU programming. My stats skills are at highschool level except for basic stochastic calculus, linear regression (OLS) and standard Monte Carlo (from a previous full-time non-quant finance role). I have no experience in machine learning either, other than Andrew Ng’s 11 week Coursera course in Octave/MATLAB which I did more than three years ago. So, I have four questions:
Questions
- Is there any hiring for QR roles other than between Aug - Jan?
- I have gathered that firms in the derivatives space might see some value in my numerical methods/programming skills. Banks (the sell side) are therefore firms for me to apply to. However, what are the names of the buy side firms in the derivatives space?
- I plan to improve my stats skills by going through and coding up the first four chapters of “Elements of Statistical Learning”, i.e., to thoroughly understand linear regression and classification. Is this plan enough to improve my stats skills to a level to get me past interviews?
- Here is the link to my CV. Is it enough to get past the CV screening stage and get me interviews?
Closing remarks
Although my questions are about QR roles, at heart I’m interested in any role that has mathematical modelling and direct commercial application, the keyword being “direct”. This is why at the start of my post I said “not quant dev roles” for fear of being put into a dev role that is not directly tied to the commercial side. I am open to a very “close to the money” quant dev role, but I think these are hard to identify. I also feel that if I say I’m open to quant dev roles, recruiters will try to place me in any old quant dev role whether it’s close to the money or not. To finish this up, I would like to ask if you can think of other roles with maths modelling and commercial application. For example, roles in energy trading, commodity trading and operations research also look interesting to me. I would really appreciate if you could tell me the names of any companies with these kinds of roles.
Thank you very much for reading!
