Career Crossroad: Actuary Vs Quant
Hi all,
I'm writing this post because I just had my annual review and promoted to Senior Actuarial Analyst and currently trying to weigh my options. My TC went from 80k to around 100k and I have 2 YOE. For those who know the actuarial space, I am 1 exam away from ASA and pretty confident I can get it around this year.
Earlier this year, I had the idea of leaving actuarial and going for a quant job (trader or research). For this, I applied and was accepted to an average Canadian University (top 10 but not UBC, McGill, Waterloo, UofT) for a MSc of Mathematics & Statistics.
My profile: Education; Graduated top 5% of no-name university in actuarial science, almost ASA, tutor for calc I and II. Work exp; no quant internships but 2 actuarial internships and 2 years as a actuarial analyst in retirement consulting (working on a lot of predictive analytics and stochastic modelling).
Projects; a few good ranking in kaggle competitons / puzzle solving. Technical skills; pretty good at Python, R (for data analysis and statistical learning) and average at C++, Java, VBA.
What I need advice / mentorship is to answer this: is it worth it to try going for quant through MSc or PhD? Or am I better to stay as an actuary? I am not looking for advantages vs disadvantages of both careers, I've done research on both and I like the perspectives of both. I want to know if it's possible to get into a good buy-side quant with my profile and grad school at an average Canadian Uni / if it's worth going for given my compensation and current career as an actuary.
I may be quant monkey, but I can tell you that from what I’ve heard and seen being a quant trader sucks ass and just involves a bunch of research to get ur phd or whatever. One of my friends had a buddy who literally started seeing ants on the walls after being a quant trader.
Genuinely asking, are you stupid?
Yes. Quite.
Go to linkedin and look up your grad school + any of the firms you want to work at. If there are few/none alumni there, then it's not worth it. If it was top 10 in the US, definitely. But I don't know enough about Canada school ranking/reputation, hence the advice.
There are literally 0, but I'm thinking of YOLOing it. There's about 10 from a school similar to mine in close geographical location.
Maybe you could try applying to some US MFE’s. The top ones tend to place pretty well into quant trading firms or quant hedge funds
I'm also a former actuary and now works in a Front Office role. I'm not in a quant role but I interact with them a lot. I would say it's definitely doable coming from a no name school but you going to need to network like hell.
Any tips for networking? I’ve added a few quant traders / researchers on LinkedIn but idk what to say to them.
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