Greetings from Singapore

Hello, my name is Gordon and i am from Singapore. I want to find out more about banking and finance careers and to learn more about the industry in general. I am a final year student at the University of London International Programs, doing a degree in Banking and finance, will probably graduate with 2:1, still hoping for 1:1 if possible.

Don't have any internships or extra cirricular activities worth mentioning, my interest in finance was only discovered rather recently. Am doing various MOOCs to sort of upgrade my skills as much as possible, and trying to read widely, both related non fiction and in terms of getting updated about current affairs.
Am largely interested in finance type careers like corporate finance, or valuation of equities/fixed income, but dont really have a solid foundation in calculus, whereas simple discounting and mathematics is okay (ie. i cannot be a quant).
One question i would like to ask anyone who doesn't mind helping is does the use of technology, for example languages like Python and things like R possibly make it a lot easier for non mathematically inclined people to perform complex mathematical calculations, or is understanding how to do these with pen and paper still ultimately necessarily to be effective in such areas?

Appreciate any help anyone can offer thanks!

 
Best Response

You've identified that you're interested in corporate finance rather than some of the more quantitative areas of finance. Unless you're doing actuarial studies, engineering or a maths heavy science stream, then you won't end up working in a role where you will be calculating anything that is "mathematically complex".

For corporate finance, don't focus on learning R or Python. Learn how to use all the basic excel functions and how to build a simple model first.

If you want to pick up programming, complete an introduction to programming course at uni or online. That will give you the basic understanding that you require to start coding in VBA, which can be very useful when you want to avoid some of the more mundane aspects of being a junior working on the financial model (e.g. running and outputting all the scenarios for the 100th time).

 

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