Aspiring for MFE

[ajaysharma]

Hi,

I am a first time poster here, though I have been an observer of this forum.
I wanted to pen down my thoughts first and am looking to gain frank opinions/suggestions from users of this forum.

I apologize in advance, if this is not an appropriate place for such a post.

First my background:
-----------------------
I am a Bachelors in Electronics Engineering from India.
I am currently working as a Project Lead with 7+ years of work experience - all of it with a large IT services provider from India.
I have been working throughout with customers in the financial domain, which includes almost 6 years between a US brokerage house
and an investment bank. I spent a year working in San Francisco.
For the past 14 months I have been working in New York for a major investment bank, and am implementing IT solutions/services
for their
post-trade processing operations division.
I have received several accolades at work and can get good references from my current and past clients.

The flip side:
-----------------------
Although I am an hands-on technical IT professional (coder), none of my work involved object oriented programming (no C++ or MATLAB).
All of it is on legacy applications (of which I have a sound understanding though).
Although all my experience involves working on financial applications - all of it is back-end processing on mainframes. My subject knowledge
is restricted to the applications I have built, and those represent only bits and pieces of the back-office operations of trade processing.
I dont have any product specific knowledge (equity, fixed income, derivative, etc), but little understanding of all kinds.
Typically our business/technical users ask for something - I try and understand where this fits, and how to deliver it to them.
I am 30 years old.

My aspirations:
-----------------------
I am not hunting for a front-office finance gig.

I am mainly looking to
a. understanding and developing front end applications (those that perform real-time critical functions)
b. getting an understanding of how financial products are structured/valued.
c. gaining an end-to-end processing of financial product or trading activity (where my back-end experience may come handy)
d. revive my mathematical inclinations

In order to meet these, I am looking to apply for the MFE program this year. (I think its more suitable for me than a CFA or MBA)


Post MFE, I look forward to these kind of opportunities (not limited to):
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
a. IT consultant for financial firms. (with possibly an end-to-end solution providing capability)
b. being an architect for enterprise solutions for financial firms
c. maybe a role in risk management, if i can land one.
d. maybe with sufficient post-grad experience and the right network, I would like to start my own company that provides custom solutions for certain financial applications

My target market is Asia-Pac, specifically Singapore (Its a personal choice since my fiance` lives there, and she cannot relocate to NY due to work-visa issues).
So am looking to apply to NUS and NTU, in order to network locally for jobs.

MY GMAT score is not great, but passable (I feel) - 690 (Q:49, V:34)

I'd appreciate if you can spend a few min to evaluate my profile and express your thoughts.
- Whether you think my goals/expectations are reasonable or far-fetched.
- Whether you think that my age or work-ex will prevent an admit, or more importantly,
prevent me from getting relevant work.
- What are other areas of work could open up for me, post MFE, with this background
- Anything else that you feel will help.

Appreciate all opinions/suggestions.

Thanks!
Ajay

 

[elliot]

Get a job in Singapore. Credit Suisse, Bank of America, Barclays and standard chartered are all hiring. Since you are interested in working in IT it does not make sense to do an MFE. You can learn finance while working on a project. If you are good at Java or C# you should be able to get some front office IT positions.

 

[ajaysharma]

Thanks Elliot for the quick response. Yes, finding a job there is a given (regardless of studies). I was looking at the MFE for long-term benefits. (since the fulltime timings are the same as the part time timings in these univs, making it flexible).
Perhaps I was eager to think that MFE program can help an IT professional advance as well (probably in a different capacity). Will dig more into this.

Thanks again!

PS:- I didnt realize how long my initial post was. Thanks for going through it. If it seems irrelevant, I'll remove it.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Besides IT jobs in Singapore, what are the prospect for more quantitative roles there? I keep hearing about risk management oriented jobs in that part of the world.

 

[elliot]

Besides IT jobs in Singapore, what are the prospect for more quantitative roles there? I keep hearing about risk management oriented jobs in that part of the world.

Even the risk management jobs are mostly related to IT. If you want more quantitative roles, then goto HongKong

---------- Post added at 02:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:32 PM ----------

Perhaps I was eager to think that MFE program can help an IT professional advance as well (probably in a different capacity). Will dig more into this.

.

In IB the usual advancement in IT is VP->Director->MD->retire. How is MFE going to help here? May be in hedge funds it may be different.