MFE admission requirements for someone with PM experience
I was thinking you were a Portfolio Manager as PM is often such abbreviated in finance.
I am planning to switch to quant partly because of my love for maths and partly because I dont like my job any more since I am drifting away from engineering.
I work in MFE admission, I run Quantnet, I have an MFE and I worked in finance so of all people, I'm mostly skeptical of everyone new to this field declaring their love for math/programming/finance. And I'm sure a lot of other people in admission/recruiting have a smirk on their face when they read this.
It has become an industry standard lie to say you want to go into quant profession because your love for math and programming, specially for newbies who just discovered the field yesterday.
Have you read all the discussion on Quantnet? How many books on our
master reading list that you read? Do you have some good idea of what people in this field doing on a day to day basis? How many people familiar with this career have you talked to?
Don't take this as a scorn but rather blunt advice to how to approach this career the right way. Saying only "I want to become a quant because I love math and programming" is a sure way to show you have no clue about this field.
You know what I thought when I found out about MFE degree back in 2006?
I thought "I hate being a Math PhD student, I can't see myself doing this for the rest of my life. What skills do I have that I can make a living?
So I have a MS in CS and I can work in front of a computer longer than most people can. I'm a good problem solver and I enjoy working with computers.
MFE seems to make better than average salary and I get to play with lot of numbers, data.
I definitely can see myself doing this for the next 10 years"
Then I spent the next couple of months online reading EVERYTHING i can get my hand on about MFE programs, what they do. I registered and participate in every quant forum existing at the time. I asked question. I probed the students who are doing it. I went to open house, I emailed the professors in those MFE programs.
I spent hours upon hours everyday reading, asking, posting until I am confident that I know what this MFE degree is about.
So I applied and it worked out the way I hoped.
Now every year I see hundreds of posts here and read applications from people who want to be a quant. I know for a fact that majority of them haven't spent a fraction of the time and effort when I first learned about this field. And I know a good number of them will fail miserably in achieving their goal, whatever lofty goal they had.
Many will not know enough about this field, the working condition, the cutthroat environment, the faux high flying lifestyle that they envision.
Why I post this in your thread? I don't even know for sure. There is something in your post that reminds me that I need to respond to it.
Maybe my message was to be yourself, and not become the thousand wannabies out there. Present yourself as someone who has practical skills and realistic expectation of the field, who has done the research to know that he is not jumping in for the Wall Street million dollars bonus that he kept reading on newspaper.