Conflicting Advice

[groundbounce]

Little about myself. I have a BS in Electrical Engineering and will complete a MS in Systems Engineering this August. I will have 3-4 years of experience designing flight electronics for missile defense systems and Mars missions. I also have some C++ work experience with a 'semi real time' rocket engine simulator (real time LabVIEW->Windows C++ environment). Lots of MATLAB and embedded/real time C work in school for signal processing and microcontrollers.

I became interested in front office quant jobs after learning about the high paced environment and challenging conditions. I also spoke to someone who use to be a quant and that's where the conflicting advice comes in. He believed I could get a mid level quant job with my prior experience/schooling without any previous knowledge about the finance world and so-so C++ skills which I plan to develop more.

After reading posts on this forum and others it seems like this might not be the case. Does my work experience count for anything if I were to apply for a front office quant job? Would I be targeting entry level jobs with 0-1 years experience, or could I legitimately apply for jobs requiring 2-5? My degrees are also from state schools (DU) and I'm wondering if that will really hurt my chances or if that is of less importance since I have real work experience. I feel like I'm already a little unqualified since I don't have a PhD from MIT.

Thanks for the help.

 

[Connor]

I don't think the jobs requiring 2-5 years are impossible but they probably will be looking for someone with more finance related experience. Draw some parallels between what you have done in the past being applicable to what you are applying for and some self-study in finance will help.

At the end of the day you won't know for sure unless you try applying to a few places and then go from there.


A PhD from MIT would probably help.....