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Am I suitable enough to become a quant or work in the financial industry?

gussilago

Joined
8/5/11
Messages
3
Points
11
Dear All-knowing people out there,​

I scooped around the internet, different forums, books and so on, trying to figure out the answer to my question: Am I suitable enough to become a quant or work in the financial industry?​

I know everyone's reading this goes "not one of these threads again" but as I said; I have tried looking around as much as I can, and since I know there are a lot of intelligent and reasonable persons in this forum I give it a shot anyways.​

The thing is that I really do like math, and I don't really have any trouble learning new things. I do like stochastic calculus and its financial applications of all sorts. BUT, I lack the skill of efficient programming. I have just started to learn C++ (say 2 months) and think it's kind of hard. Not the basics as loops and such, but rather OOP with all the inheritance, pointers and so on. It would be fair to say that I really am a 'newbie'-programmer, and not one of those that have written code in all sorts of languages during my childhood or in my sparetime just for the fun of it. Of course I know SOME scientific programming (if there is such a thing), where I am able to implement some solvers to ODE:s and such, but not really high on making "real programs" (if you know what I mean).​

I also like to have a job that is somewhat flexible, meaning that I work in some sort of project-group trying to implement or create new models (or akin), discussing new approaches and so on.​

Furthermore, I have an unconditional offer at a MSc-programme in Mathematics and Finance in London, where they say that "they educate people to work mainly as quants". The program itself has an introductory course in C++ that stretches over about 1 week, but I doubt this will cover enough for one to actually learn the language itself. I am worried that I will have a big problem with the programming stuff and therefore will fail in different areas due to this fact. I suppose that over 80% of all the course material in this specific Masters-programme is about pure mathematics, rather than any programming, but then: Quanting seems to be more or less about programming; if you don't know it good enough, or efficiently enough, you don't fit as a quant. A lot of you guys reading this probably house in the US, but it shouldn't be that different from the kind of work that exist in the UK.​

I really do think that this line of work seems like the thing to do; the math that you use is really interesting and I believe that this is the future work for many engineers.​

I would really appreciate if you could take your time and give me some answers to my questions. It is a lot of money, and therefore a great risk, for me to just "hop on, for the fun of it".​

Thanks,​
/gussilago​
(a bit long I know...)​
 
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