Quick question about programming languages

T

TheMaster

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8/13/12
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I'm dedicating this next year to studying programming before I start my Ph.D. studies. Are these programming languages sufficient enough to be a competitive applicant for internships?

1. C++ (self-study)
2. Visual Basic (1 community college course + self-study)
3. Python (2 courses in community college)
4. Excel VBA (self-study)
5. SQL (self-study + microsoft certification sql server 2012)

I plan on taking C++ through the baruch program or going off some books on the master reading list. In addition, I plan on taking the microsoft certification for SQL.
 
Sounds ambitious but essential skills to have. I would probably drop 2) and make sure I got 1) and 5) nailed down by taking on some real-life projects such as getting your programs to read/import data from web API, store in database, do things with them and spit out reports in Excel.
 
Instead of VB.NET (I presume that's what you mean by Visual Basic, there's no point in learning VB6 nowadays) I think I'd recommend C# -- esp. since you're already planning to have VBA covered. A good final project (presumably one of many) might be to test if you can put these skills together -- e.g., XLL (or one many of, usually friendlier, wrappers, like XLW) to test your Excel with C++ -- and also VSTO (Excel-DNA might also be a good -- possibly better -- alternative) to test your Excel with C# dev skills.
 
Polter said:
Instead of VB.NET (I presume that's what you mean by Visual Basic, there's no point in learning VB6 nowadays) I think I'd recommend C# -- esp. since you're already planning to have VBA covered. A good final project (presumably one of many) might be to test if you can put these skills together -- e.g., XLL (or one many of, usually friendlier, wrappers, like XLW) to test your Excel with C++ -- and also VSTO (Excel-DNA might also be a good -- possibly better -- alternative) to test your Excel with C# dev skills.
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=( there was a c# class available but I didn't register for it because I didn't see it listed in many quantitative analyst job ads. As for VB, its VB 2010. I read a post on here about a quantitative risk modeler who used visual basic so that's why I took it.
 
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