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What if I don't have a relevant bachelor degree?

Mohab Selim

Mohab Selim

Joined
11/7/13
Messages
4
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What if I don't have a bachelor degree in finance, economics, engineering, actuarial science, physics, computer science or another related subject? I'm a fresh grad with a bachelor of commerce (accounting major), according to universities I looked online my bachelor is not relevant enough to financial engineering or quantitative finance to apply for quantitative finance/financial engineering MSc because accounting is not considered finance. Will a post-graduate diploma in quantitative finance suffice? How else will I be able to shift my career towards quantitative finance/financial engineering?
 
if u took and aced all required classes for admission, u can get in with a major in women's studies
 
Depends on the school, but pretty universally: some level of calculus, probability/statistics/econometrics, differential equations, linear algebra. Programming is always favorable.
 
Yes, but when I approach a business school, do I just list the aforementioned classes and ask to take them independently? During my years in college, the only quantitative courses I took were financial mathematics and business statistics, will business schools allow me to take the rest of classes on their own without being enrolled under a specific program?
 
There are schools that will let you take individual classes, certainly. I don't know how useful they would be in making you competitive for a good MFE program though.
 
I don't want to discourage you, but I have to point out two things:

1) You do not have a realistic idea of whether you'll enjoy being a quant. Unless you've sat down and read some book on numerical linear algebra (for example) and loved every page, you can't really know. Even if you somehow get that type of "quant" job, you'll be spending the bulk of your time around people who loved to study mathematics or computer science or statistics, and you'll be miserable if you aren't really one of them.

2) The prereq courses will have been taken by a typical applicant at various times during their education. For example, if you didn't take probability early on in college, then you didn't have all the intervening years to develop the intuition further and make connections with other subjects you study. You are basically trying to cram, like the guy that studies at the last minute before a final exam. Your level of understanding will be more shallow than those who naturally studied those subjects as part of their degree program. So you might get in (after all, those programs need tuition-paying students), but be warned that the better the program the more likely you will be at the bottom. You could very well end up paying $$ and end up dropping out.
 
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