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Is it late for me to be a quant?

The_Moroccan.

Joined
6/23/11
Messages
22
Points
13

Hi everyone.
This is my first post, I just joined today. But I have been following the website for 8 months now.
My question is, I've never known about quant job, and I would have picked it when I was at school, I have a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics/Computer science and a Master's degree in CS and more than 10 years of experience as software engineer. My love to Math pushed me to think about going back to school to get a degree in Mathematical finance. I will be 40 when I finish my degree, for me it's not a problem as long as I will be doing what I really love, but the question is do companies prefer young people over an old one like me for entry level positions in quant job. I know I will take a pay cut switching to quant job. But that's Ok too for few years ( I hope! ).
I live in Chicago, I looked at UoC, IIT and Depaul university, they all offer kind of math/Computational finance degree. Does anyone in here knows about the computational finance offered by Depaul university ( It's not heavy on Math, but the courses are not bad either ).
 
Its never too late to do anything good.

But be realistic. Evaluate yourself and your target programs rationally and hard facts
 
i was always told that if you are smart, you will get a job. No one ever mentioned age...
 
The_Moroccan. said:
Hi everyone.
This is my first post, I just joined today. But I have been following the website for 8 months now.
My question is, I've never known about quant job, and I would have picked it when I was at school, I have a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics/Computer science and a Master's degree in CS and more than 10 years of experience as software engineer. My love to Math pushed me to think about going back to school to get a degree in Mathematical finance. I will be 40 when I finish my degree, for me it's not a problem as long as I will be doing what I really love, but the question is do companies prefer young people over an old one like me for entry level positions in quant job. I know I will take a pay cut switching to quant job. But that's Ok too for few years ( I hope! ).
I live in Chicago, I looked at UoC, IIT and Depaul university, they all offer kind of math/Computational finance degree. Does anyone in here knows about the computational finance offered by Depaul university ( It's not heavy on Math, but the courses are not bad either ).
Click to expand...

I am in the same position. To make it worse my undergraduate degree is in Engineering. Currently I am looking into Calculus 1 and a book on elementary statistics to evaluate myself whether I would be able to understand what Quants do.
 
Given your background both - educational and working, it is not inappropriate to switch since those subjects are closely related to quantitative jobs generally. It is not too uncommon practice to switch in such age.
 
Thank you for your responses. But I looked at Math Fin in UoC (University of chicago) and IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology) and Computational Finance in DePaul University and they looked kind of different the Math fin are heavy on Math but Computational Fin is more on time series, statistics and finance classes. Can anyone pls tell me the difference between these programs and are they all lead to quant jobs?
 
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