NYU Career Fair discussion

[Andy Nguyen]

How did the Career Fair go ? Did you meet any Quantnet members there ?

 

[Sam Harris]

How did the Career Fair go ? Did you meet any Quantnet members there ?

Not that I'm aware of...



The fair?

I had two headhunters, a recruiter, and a MD tell me I should go into sales. :-k

 

[Yuriy]

I had two headhunters, a recruiter, and a MD tell me I should go into sales. :-k

But isn't sales more on the MBA side?

 

[Sam Harris]

But isn't sales more on the MBA side?

The MD of UBS Delta Americas, Tim Grant was there and he said that Sales & Trading gets a bad rap among quants for no good reason. He said the industry is changing and people need "mathematical wisdom" to truly understand the instruments. He said the "Princeton LaCrosse Player" image is fading into the distant memory and deals are closed now not just on personality and a game of golf, but on being capable of genuinely understanding the clients needs and being intelligent enough with mathematics and programming to properly design and calibrate products to meet their needs. Of course, it requires a healthy dose of sales ability too, which is just as much natural talent as math.

 

[DominiConnor]

I didn't hear what this guy said, and I think he's right.
But in a narrow sense.

First up there is a difference between your team needing your skills and valuing. Speaking as someone who has been hanging around in banks sine before the average quantnetter was born, I will share with you being at meetings where sales-oriented senior managers say "we need to focus on the guys who bring in the money". That's not only a quote but it's almost verbatim for more than one CEO.

He wants a very specific set of skills. If he wanted my firm to find someone for him, he'd have to be prepared to spend twice as long explaining the job to us.
At least.

Hell it may be three times as long.

Quants often serve more than one master, being "in" one gang but doing work "for" another.

This is worse. They may say they want quant skills from you more than maths, but that's a cynical lie. Well not a lie, but a model of the world that in no way corresponds to reality.

You will need to be good sales person, and intersection of good quants with those who can sell is a damned small set.

Also getting hired will be a process of extravagant levels of randomness caused by the fact that when you are being interviewed by people outside your speciality they will find it very hard to resist hiring people on the basis of their own speciality.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

The MD of UBS Delta Americas, Tim Grant was there and he said that Sales & Trading gets a bad rap among quants for no good reason.

I met that English gent when I interviewed at UBS about 3 months ago. He himself only has an MFE and one of the youngest MD at UBS. While I was there, I met with Tim and 2 others MDs but Tim was the most vocal about UBS' push to hire more MFE instead of MBA. He came right out that he didn't find the MBA has the technical skills needed for his group and others at UBS so he is spearheading an effort with UBS' campus recruiting to specially target the MFE crowd.

So he being at the NYU career fair seems to indicate they really put some efforts into this.

 

[Yuriy]

I met that English gent when I interviewed at UBS about 3 months ago. He himself only has an MFE and one of the youngest MD at UBS. While I was there, I met with Tim and 2 others MDs but Tim was the most vocal about UBS' push to hire more MFE instead of MBA. He came right out that he didn't find the MBA has the technical skills needed for his group and others at UBS so he is spearheading an effort with UBS' campus recruiting to specially target the MFE crowd.

So he being at the NYU career fair seems to indicate they really put some efforts into this.

If everyone follows his lead, there might be huge demand for MFEs in the future.

There is one thing I'm curious about. Given that Quant-oriented people have various skills, I wonder what the distribution of the skills is and what is the demand for each skill.
By "skills" I mean knowledge of various parts of math For example, some people are more into PDEs, some more into Stochastics, some more into Structured Finance, some do more than one.

 

[Vic_Siqiao]

i found it useless for me........maybe it is better for MFE looking for fulltime job.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

i found it useless for me........maybe it is better for MFE looking for fulltime job.

I didn't know you have to pay $45 for admission. I thought being an MFE student is hard and costly enough.
Sounds like this is an opportunity for firms and MFE students to learn more about each other. It's a new field so they are not as active in recruiting as MBA fair, I assume.

Wouldn't you be able to get business cards, talks to people, follow up with them via emails, etc...that may lead to something...being proactive is the key.

 

[Sam Harris]

I've landed half a dozen phone interviews so far this week as a result of the career fair (including some hedge funds)... and I learned that MFE can lead to broker... which might actually suit me best.

I spent more than $500 on the career fair (with plane ticket and hotel rooms), but it was worth every penny.

 

[Yan He]

Since I didn't expect too much from the Job Fair, I think it's a not bad experience for me. As we all know, the weather was so bad that day, and so many students stood in line for average 30-40 mins to submit the resume or waited for the words "Please go to our website and apply through....".

People from Moody's and Faddie Mac even told me after about 10 mins pleasant conversation, that "...actually, we are not in hiring proceeding now...." Well, I know that market is undergoing something we don't want to see now. I also had onsite interview after sumbitting my resume and talking with the people from participating company. In general, I feel that many companies show up for participation, not for hiring.

The most warm-hearted booth should be Headhunters. Except for one guy from the Option Group (yes, the one that gave us talk before). With really broken English, he told me that "...I can tell you are very confident about yourself, but Baruch is not a big name to Wall Street.....".
But I still think headhunters have the information and connection for serious job-hunters (especially for those with related experience, or strong programming skills).

The talk "How I became a Quant" is informative and entertaining engouh. And my dinner and drink in lower east side after the Fair are happy memories.

It's still worth the $45 for such an event. (I gave up around $450 for the event, have to take the work day off)

 

[DominiConnor]

I wonder what the motivation of the HH was, it may be an honest appraisal or he may have been softening you up for a less attractive job.
Of the jobs I work on, only a few % are dreamt up by me, the rest is the bank/HF/AM wanting a person to do X.

It does lead to the game theory of playing is a less attractive market...
If that HH has you lined up for a mid/low grade job then it will be hard to shift him, but it does put a floor on your position, which is good if you fear the worst.
So it may be good to go along with the idea, and see what it pans out at.
But make sure you're going for the sexy jobs as well.

I don't know Yan He, but my view is that there is no "right slot" for her, or for most people.
There is a distribution of jobs of varying utility to her and corresponding probabilities, and I would like to emphasise that recruitment is a stochastic, not a deterministic process. Thus you will miss jobs you should have got, and luck will run your way as well.

 

[joe_bradley]

If it's any consolation to anyone else out there, I didn't get a lot out of it either. I had two tentative interviews with headhunters and both fell through, apparently last-minute cancellations. One electronic trading group did interview me; the particular firm interviewed quite a few other people there.

Also re. Yan He's experience, I'm pretty sure the HH that spoke at Baruch was from Wall Street Options, not the Options Group. Not exactly the catchiest names, eh?

 

[Vic_Siqiao]

I didn't know you have to pay $45 for admission. I thought being an MFE student is hard and costly enough.
Sounds like this is an opportunity for firms and MFE students to learn more about each other. It's a new field so they are not as active in recruiting as MBA fair, I assume.

Wouldn't you be able to get business cards, talks to people, follow up with them via emails, etc...that may lead to something...being proactive is the key.

yes, i can understand that, however sometimes i just cant feel so confident to be PROACTIVE, but im gonna try to be that style.thanks

 

[muysal]

Yan He, I think I know the guy you are talking about. He also told me and two of my friends from my program that we should look for "quant developer" positions as we had programming experience! Not only that one other friend of mine was talking to him in his native language, apperantly my friend was told that "he should not have came to US instead he should have stayed in China". I think if anyone needed to have stayed in China, it was the guy himself

I would not take it seriously, as Dominic said he is probably trying to lure people into the types of positions he currently has which are also kind of a "sure bet" for him.

I also think that for internship seekers it was kind of waste of time.

 

[DominiConnor]

There is more of a shortage of good quant developers than most other types of entry level quant position. There are no courses to produce them anywhere.

As for "staying in China", if I as a white Westerner had said that to a foreigner, I would run the risk of being called racist. It is possible that he thinks that Chinese people are "better suited" to QD work, and that they would "be happier" as QDs.

As for Vic's reluctance to be proactive, I recommend charity work. Shaking a tin, trying to get money off people is the sort of training that a corporation would pay thousands to get for their sales and business development staff.
It has several advantages.
First, you get rapid feedback on what works, and what does not, and a ready made score.

It does not matter if a pitch fails, since you lose a tiny amount of money, so experimentation is helped.

Also you know in your heart that you are doing a "good thing", and thus the normal human reluctance to approach strangers and risk their disapproval is reversed because you think of the people you are helping with the money.


But as a pimp myself, I am sometimes the bearer of personal analysis that people may not like. As I say elsewhere, too many very smart Chinese nationals do not get the jobs they should because of poor spoken language skills. Sadly, it is the case that low communication skills to some people like the Options guy equate directly to some sort of IT role.

 

[dstefan]

Also re. Yan He's experience, I'm pretty sure the HH that spoke at Baruch was from Wall Street Options, not the Options Group. Not exactly the catchiest names, eh?

Actually, people from Options Group spoke at Baruch in September 2006. Todd Fahey from Wall Street Options spoke in September 2007. He was not at the Career Fair.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

The MD of UBS Delta Americas, Tim Grant was there and he said that Sales & Trading gets a bad rap among quants for no good reason. He said the industry is changing and people need "mathematical wisdom" to truly understand the instruments.

I'm setting up an interview Tim Grant soon. Will set up a thread so Quantnet members can send in their questions about UBS plan regarding hiring more MFE