Career and Education Advice

[theOrange]

Hi, I have been read Quantnet for a period of time and would like to some advice from some of you guys over here regarding my career options.

Some background of mine:

I am from Australia, doing a Bachelor of Actuarial Science. My GPA (we use an average mark system) is around 80 out of 100 and have passed or attained exemptions from the following professional institutes:

CPA Australia: Exemptions from 8 exams at the foundation level

Institute of Actuaries of Australia: Exemptions from 8 exams

CFA Institute: Passed CFA Level I Exam

I have tried programming on R and Matlab but hated coding. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the financial mathematics syllabus from the Actuarial Institute. I was wondering what possible quant positions I can possibly get that require only some programming.

Also, I was intending to apply to ETH Zurich (Quant Finance or Statistics), University of Chicago (Masters of Financial Mathematics) or UCL (Computational Finance). Are there any schools that I should also be applying for?

 

[ygmwy]

Quant jobs are changing nowadays. I had many interviews that seemed to be in pure quant, but they ended up needing programmers. Let's just say that you are putting yourself at an extreme disadvantage by distancing yourself from programming. Many quant internships need programmers. (Including the one I'm doing now.) Where the math is light, and the dirty work that they make interns do is implementation (aka programming). Unless you're a genius, you'll probably have to spend some time doing the grunge work, and programming is it. In the future, quants will have to have a more diverse variety of skills including programming, data cleaning, algorithms, machine learning, trading, and such. The days where they only hired someone to do that math are over. (Again, except for the absolute geniuses).

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Unless you're a genius, you'll probably have to spend some time doing the grunge work, and programming is it. In the future, quants will have to have a more diverse variety of skills including programming, data cleaning, algorithms, machine learning, trading, and such. The days where they only hired someone to do that math are over. (Again, except for the absolute geniuses).

That's what we have been saying here over the last few years. Anyone in their right mind would realize that having an MFE degree without any good technical skills is useless these days. They may get a job that is far from what MFE is designed for.
Having good programming/data analysis/stats skills will open door to other high-paying jobs as well.
https://www.quantnet.com/threads/do-quant-algo-and-hf-trading-jobs-still-exist.15893/

 

[IntoDarkness]

im just wondering how u gona do quant without programming?