Questions about career

[some_guy]

Hi guys,

I'm wondering how possible it is, given my profile, to work in finance and especially as a quant.
I'm graduating in October from one of the best French engineering school (engineering schools in France are basically the best cursus possible related to science & engineering, it is much more valued than university) and I got a 3.9 GPA last year. This year I'm doing a MSc at Imperial College (UK) in Signal Processing. Next month I'll be working and I'm probably going to be in a firm that creates software for financial institutions, doing R&D in the "front office" part of the software (in C++). I have at this point no notion of finance whatsoever (I hope to learn a lot from my job)
Now the reason I'd like to move to the finance sector is mostly due to the fact that I feel that my math skills are a bit wasted, it's something I was very good at during the previous year and that I'm doing less and less. The financial sector and quant jobs seems to be very interesting in that respect with lots of modelisations, etc but I could be wrong.

Any way, is it possible to reconvert in this direction, and how easily?
My plan was to work next year in order to save up money and learn a few things, and apply for the year 2012-2013 to a Master in Finance, most likely in the US. What do you think about this, do you have any advice?

thanks and sorry for the long post

 

[some_guy]

Or should I be asking in some other thread?

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Depends on what exactly you will be involved in model creating at the job, it may be more quantitative than most so-called "quant" jobs. There are specialist software firms like Quantifi, Numerix whose products are used by many quantitative finance professionals.
Without finance knowledge and prior modeling experience, you likely will be doing IT chores, at least initially.

You should go for this. Working a year or two would earn you money and give you a better idea of what kind of jobs you hate or some idea of what job you may enjoy. You may not need to do a Master in Finance once you get some work experience and connection.