• C++ Programming for Financial Engineering
    Highly recommended by thousands of MFE students. Covers essential C++ topics with applications to financial engineering. Learn more Join!
    Python for Finance with Intro to Data Science
    Gain practical understanding of Python to read, understand, and write professional Python code for your first day on the job. Learn more Join!
    An Intuition-Based Options Primer for FE
    Ideal for entry level positions interviews and graduate studies, specializing in options trading arbitrage and options valuation models. Learn more Join!

Is a quant job possible for me?

Joined
3/6/13
Messages
1
Points
11
Hey everybody!

I am currently a first year graduate student going for an MS degree in Finance. To be clear this is NOT mathematical finance, financial engineering, or anything like that. Its more like an overview of a variety of financial topics from econometrics, mathematical economics, international finance, financial derivatives, and the like.

In addition to the aforementioned degree, I have a decent background in math (calculus sequence, linear algebra, probability and statistics). I never actually took differential equations, but from my job as a college math tutor and from a bit of self-teaching, I feel that I have a decent grasp of the material. I took the GRE in 2012 and my scores were in the range of average scores for Ivy League schools. I have no prior computer programming experience, but recently I have begun to self study the foundations of programming in Python, with the goal of eventually learning Matlab or C++, as they seem to be the most common/important ones to know. My current graduate GPA is approximately a 3.83.

All that being said, I recently attended my first graduate students- only job fair, and was underwhelmed, to say the least. The jobs solely consisted of sales positions that one could get without even a bachelor's degree, and marketing. Not my cup of tea.

I am curious, is there any hope of any sort of quant job for a person in my shoes? Any advice that could be given will be appreciated, from what sorts of jobs might be up my alley, to if I should take other classes in addition to my core courses (perhaps DE, an official programming course, or even a modeling course.)

Thank you for taking your time to read and (hopefully) respond.

Cheers, gov'nas!
 
I was in a similar situation to yours few years ago except that I took a few more quantitative courses at undergrad.
I suggest you take more math/stat/cs courses to strengthen your profile during your MS degree.
 
Back
Top