New to the Site! Advice!!!!

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SouthBayRider

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What's going on everyone? In need of some advice. I'm currently a mechanical engineering student in california but I am intrigued with finance and mathematics. I always thought of myself as a math guy and it came somewhat naturally to me. I chose engineering because It incorporated a lot of mathematics. I'm nearly a year away from graduating and i can't turn back now. What advice can any of give in regards to breaking into a finance or what route I should take to get a quant position? ON of my close buddies goes to berkeley and says the business school is awesome. I know berkeley's mfe program is awesome. Should I have the mindest of trying to get into a top mfe program and then breaking in to a quant position? I'm pretty sure there aren't any available quant positions to graduates with just an engineering degree. How do mfe programs guide you through a finance curriculum if you do not have a background in finance? I apologize if my questions are all over the place but the research i've done on this topic only provide basic and vague answer or descriptions. Thanks in advance
 
Since you are not very familiar with MFE programs, it may not be for you.
I would suggest that you use all resource available at the current school. Is there a career services for the Engineering Dept, school-wide? Do financial firms recruit from your school? Is there an alumni network that you can use to connect with those that already in finance?

As for the jobs, you need to know what roles are there before you target them. What real world skills can you offer? Can you code? Have you worked with financial database before?
 
Andy Nguyen said:
Since you are not very familiar with MFE programs, it may not be for you.
I would suggest that you use all resource available at the current school. Is there a career services for the Engineering Dept, school-wide? Do financial firms recruit from your school? Is there an alumni network that you can use to connect with those that already in finance?

As for the jobs, you need to know what roles are there before you target them. What real world skills can you offer? Can you code? Have you worked with financial database before?
Click to expand...

Andy come on brah was this
Since you are not very familiar with MFE programs, it may not be for you.
Click to expand...
even useful? However I agree with the rest of your response. SouthBayRider I would keep talking to people on this site and also I would try to speak with someone in the MFE department.
 
Recruiting from financial firms at my university are horrible. I know the engineering dept has many companies that actively recruit undergrads. The career center is pretty bad. Just basic information like have an awesome resume and apply to every possible employment opportunity on their website. The finance society is horrendous. There's only about 6-7 dudes that are involved and that in itself is a very loose term. Theyjusthave weekly meetings and that's practically it. The schools known for engineering (not really sure why you would go there if you aren't engineering). I do not know C++ but I am currently taking a required excel \class and I am learning VBA-excel coding. I have not used a financial database. Thanks for the responses guys. How should I distinguish myself if I do go the mfe route and how do I prove that I have wanted to go into finance even with an undergraduate engineering degree?
 
SouthBayRider said:
How should I distinguish myself if I do go the mfe route and how do I prove that I have wanted to go into finance even with an undergraduate engineering degree?
Click to expand...
You made the first right move by signing up here and ask question. Quantnet is pretty well-known by most MFE admission people (I may be biased about Quantnet, of course) so just by mentioning it, it shows some initiative on your part and that you actually do due diligence. That would score you some points and put you ahead of competitors who don't tape on the resources here.

Then, spend the next few weeks, read, read and read all the free guides that you can download from this reading list
http://www.quantnet.com/forum/threa...uants-mfe-financial-engineering-students.535/

Once you are done with it, time to buy/lend/browse from your local bookstore other books at least in the first 3 sections. Sample them on Amazon and see if they are interesting to you.

Microsoft has free Visual Studio, MS SQL you can download and install. Download some free financial database and play with them
http://www.quantnet.com/forum/threads/master-list-of-free-financial-data.1036/

I would suggest the next step would be to attend free seminars, meetup that are organized by local firms, universities.
 
Andy thanks big time!!!! As soon as I'm done with these two midterm I have coming up next week I'm going to knock out as much reading as I possibly can on the subject. Which financial database is mostly used by firms? Is C++ the preferred language?
 
C++ is the preferred language for the MFE schools (most expect you to be familiar with it when you apply). As for preferred by firms, that's actually a frequent topic of debate on this forum.
 
Go to Yahoo Finance, pick any stock and download their end of day price for the past 30 years. Do the same for indices DJ, SP500, etc.
It's free and allow you access to some huge amount of data that you can pull from database, query, do some simple analysis on.
 
Andy in one of previous replies you mentioned downloading Visual Studio, MS SQL. What exactly do these programs do or help with? I apologize for the naive question but a basic google search didn't provide any useful information.
 
Visual Studio is an IDE that you use to write programs in. C++/C#/.NET and a bunch of other languages are supported.
MS SQL is a database server. You can import the data you download from the web into it and use an interface to query the data.

There are alternatives to these on Linux OS.

Looks like you need to be more familiar with technical tools, because it's how most people here earn a living.
 
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=finance+job+sql 30,600,000 results....

Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft.

Visual Studio supports different programming languages by means of language services, which allow the code editor and debugger to support (to varying degrees) nearly any programming language, provided a language-specific service exists. Built-in languages include C/C++ (via Visual C++), VB.NET (via Visual Basic .NET), C# (via Visual C#), and F# (as of Visual Studio 2010[2]). Support for other languages such as M, Python, and Ruby among others is available via language services installed separately. It also supports XML/XSLT, HTML/XHTML, JavaScript and CSS. Individual language-specific versions of Visual Studio also exist which provide more limited language services to the user: Microsoft Visual Basic, Visual J#, Visual C#, and Visual C++.

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database server product by Microsoft. Its primary query languages are T-SQL and ANSI SQL.

SQL (officially
11px-Loudspeaker.svg.png
/ˈɛs kjuː ˈɛl/, often
11px-Loudspeaker.svg.png
/ˌsiːkwəl/),[3] often referred to as Structured Query Language, is a database computer declarative language designed for managing data in relational database management systems (RDBMS), and originally based upon relational algebra and tuple relational calculus.[4]

Despite not adhering to the relational model as described by Codd, it became the most widely used database language.[6][7]

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SQL_Server
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sql
 
Thanks ANdy and AMamnda for the breakdown. Do you know of any good websites with quant speakers? SOmeone posted a link of someone talking about algorithm trading. That was a sikk video
 

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