Help Me Choose Where To Go For Undergrad

GoIllini said:
I think a $40K debt paydown is easily doable in two years; perhaps as little as 18 months if the markets are OK.
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How much do you think I'll be making out of college? How much do you think it costs to live in NYC?
 
To be fair, Ilya was being picky, i.e
Been there, done that, left said profession because it's got nothing to do with the exams at all. Otherwise I never would have left it in the first place.
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But it's Gollini who says I can pay off the loans in two years... I myself don't think that's feasible.
 
The problem is with paying them off in two years is that...you are planning to go to grad school correct? So, not only do you have the cost of your undergrad, you also have at least another 1 or 2 years of graduate schooling to pay back.
 
Yes. It is feasile for Goillini if you know the kind of penny pinching mentality he exercises. I met him in person and read enough of his posts to know his way of life.
That does not mean you can live and save like him. If you doubt you can follow a strict financial fiscal plan, chances are you can't.
50K is a lot to pay off. If you have more than that, it requires disciplines.
 
Andy Nguyen said:
Yes. It is feasile for Goillini if you know the kind of penny pinching mentality he exercises. I met him in person and read enough of his posts to know his way of life.
That does not mean you can live and save like him. If you doubt you can follow a strict financial fiscal plan, chances are you can't.
50K is a lot to pay off. If you have more than that, it requires disciplines.
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I can pay it off, and I'm penny pinching myself, but reasonable. Just takes more time.
 
Andy Nguyen said:
Yes. It is feasile for Goillini if you know the kind of penny pinching mentality he exercises. I met him in person and read enough of his posts to know his way of life.
That does not mean you can live and save like him. If you doubt you can follow a strict financial fiscal plan, chances are you can't.
50K is a lot to pay off. If you have more than that, it requires disciplines.
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Haha Andy. Thanks for the back-handed compliment. I'm pretty sure Andy got this impression when I suggested some relatively inexpensive dive bar for everyone on QuantNet to meet up at, ordered a Yuengling, got mildly annoyed when I found out they charged me $7 for it, and then took the PATH train home.

I think the trick is really just trying to maintain some of the discipline that you had in college. When I was in school, I'd look at eating out and say, "I can't afford it." The trick is pretending you *still* can't afford it and that $15 is *still* a lot of money- along with hanging out with thrifty friends. (They do exist even in the banking world)

Regardless, in the grand scheme of things, $50K is not the end of the world for an outstanding education vs. a very very good education. It essentially means it will be less likely that you'll need to pay for grad school or take a long detour through analytics and IT land to wind up in the front office on Wall Street. So assuming you get good grades and have a fairly good work ethic, the $50K in extra cost will cover itself within seven or eight years. And it's interest-free for the first four years.

The question here is whether you're pretty sure you can land on Wall Street- and that you will want to land there in four years. If you wind up at IBM or Google or AT&T, the $50K is merely wasted money.
 
Alexei Smirnov said:
whatever happened to that guy?
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Looks like he got a JOB in Chicago as data analyst.
Just check out his profile. He got a new blog as well.
http://ilyaquant.wordpress.com/
@IlyaKEightSix that's totally not cool, dude. Happy for you to be finally working now but at least think about all the help people here have given you after all these years.
At least, just update us on your good news.
 
GoIllini said:
Haha Andy. Thanks for the back-handed compliment. I'm pretty sure Andy got this impression when I suggested some relatively inexpensive dive bar for everyone on QuantNet to meet up at, ordered a Yuengling, got mildly annoyed when I found out they charged me $7 for it, and then took the PATH train home.
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I got that impression when I first met you and you bought me a bottle of finest champagne and ordered everyone in the house a round.
On a serious note, I'm an avid follower of your posts (here and on WSO) and you talked about the virtue quite a bit.
I organized a meetup last Sat. I'll ping you next time we get together and hope to buy you a bottle.
 
Aside

{

Oh, well, now that the cat's out of the bag, it's just that my mom's afraid my deadbeat dad knowing of my job might give him a reason for getting out of his child support arrears, so I was a bit loath to do it, but now that you found the new blog, yep, I got a new job, with two very talented out and out quants right down the hall on the trading floor--in fact, the head quant through his open mindedness more or less brought me on board.

But uh, yeah, I do have a job in Chicago now, and I really like it so far, me suffering from newbie syndrome aside (wished I learned the R data management syntax in school, but I suppose you never really do use it when all the problems are gift-wrapped with a cherry on top so you can skip the data management work, which is absolutely *critical*).

Gotta say, the stat arb group here is the nicest group of people I've met in a long time. Really, everyone here is absolutely terrific, though the CEO can be a bit overwhelming at times (he used to be a pit trader, so he doesn't suffer fools lightly, has a deep voice, and will absolutely hammer any flaw in a newbie's thought process), but really, the people here are really, really terrific individuals.

Oh, and yeah, most of my time gets spent programming in R, but using it as a fully-blown programming language, with the statistical tools just the occasional bit of gravy. A bit frustrating that I know so little at the moment that I can't contribute to the firm as much as I would like, but I suppose so long as I approach my duties diligently and get a bit more self-awareness (10 and a half months of sitting at home with nobody watching you erodes the discipline a bit), I'll be a fully-blown quant in short order. Enjoying my work so far, but priority one is on getting cured of newbie syndrome, to the point that my closest coworker (and new friend) gets concerned that I might burn out for working such long days, and the CEO jokes that I don't sleep (in fact, it's the only thing I do on weekdays outside the office, because my time is best spent being at the office and learning as much as I can).

}

OnTopic
{
Student loans are a pain in the you know what. So far, since I have no food costs (plenty of leftovers at work), aside from rent, internet, and the occasional toiletries, I'm planning on scrounging away my pennies, since if I spend all of my non-weekend working hours at work (and some weekend hours too), I shouldn't need much more and will be able to make ends meet until I prove my worth for a few more cookies.

Either way, IMO, in the financial industry, you're not going to get the kinds of riches people associate with it working for a salary making someone else richer. Either you deliver a service to the shareholders as someone in upper management (fat chance), or you learn how to create the crown jewels of the financial industry--namely, putting together a trading algorithm.

But the real question is how much you want to pay for a brand name. I went to Rutgers for a statistics masters instead of Lehigh out of cost concerns, which in hindsight may have very well been a lucky happenstance, since I learned enough R to get my foot in the door here (and nowhere near enough to hit the ground running). So yeah, my advice is when you're making so little money that you're still worried about student loans, then scrounge your pennies, and also because you should not be having enough free time to make use of it otherwise.

Or so I think anyway.
}
 
I know you signed the same NDAs and trade secret documents that everyone else at the firm does. If you're feeling a burning desire to write about where and what you do in this industry, you better make sure you anonymize your name and company's name. Most firms will have you out the door if they find out that you're writing about what's going on at the company. And you're starting to pop up in various Google searches.

Just a friendly little FYI from one of your co-workers.
 
BrianSpicer said:
I know you signed the same NDAs and trade secret documents that everyone else at the firm does. If you're feeling a burning desire to write about where and what you do in this industry, you better make sure you anonymize your name and company's name. Most firms will have you out the door if they find out that you're writing about what's going on at the company. And you're starting to pop up in various Google searches.

Just a friendly little FYI from one of your co-workers.
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LOL

Listen to him Ilya.
 
BrianSpicer said:
I know you signed the same NDAs and trade secret documents that everyone else at the firm does. If you're feeling a burning desire to write about where and what you do in this industry, you better make sure you anonymize your name and company's name. Most firms will have you out the door if they find out that you're writing about what's going on at the company. And you're starting to pop up in various Google searches.

Just a friendly little FYI from one of your co-workers.
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Heh. Nice to see you here, Brian. In fact, anytime I make a post now, I make sure to think about the fact that I'm working for a company with trade secrets, and keep everything as vague as possible.
 

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