please help me make it clear

Not to be rude but your English is not great; a test as reading intensive as the CFA might be tough. I would be content with the PhD. You could most likely go straight to a hedge fund if you are really at a target school. Good luck!

Thanks. I already passed CFA Lev 1 and actually I didn't find the reading "intensive" (at least not too much compared to the reading part of GRE, which I got 750 out of 800). My English is not as excellent as Barton Biggs who majored in "English and Creative Writing" at Yale, but at least I know how I can make big money and that is, for an industry like HF, the key to everything.

Oh man, they must have really lowered the bar for Chem PhD admittance...

Wherever you are, you have a huge network at your disposal. Go find the alumni network and start asking there. If you don't know anyone else in the industry, people who went to your school might be a good place to start. Alot of them will be a little older like yourself, and can provide you with good advice.

Apply for an ivy grad school yourself and when you get rejected, you know where the Chem PhD bar is.

Personally I don't care where this bar is, as long as someone points me in the right direction and I can get a Jack and Coke.

Anyways, just because someone doesn't use proper grammar or doesn't apply proper sentence structure doesn't mean they are worthless or ignorant, probably just lazy at best. Ohh, and making money is the key to pretty much everything.

seandai, depends on what type of analysis you want to do. i don't think you'd have any trouble getting a job as an analyst at a hf, but i don't know if you would be paid even what you would at an oil company doing field research. a phd makes sense for a data crunching/coding intensive job, but im getting the sense that you are looking for a more fundamental research job, so I don't know if you could get one without having a business background. but going into consulting especially bcg or mckinsey should not be a problem.

Thanks a lot aachimp. And your guess is right. I'm more interested in doing fundamental research for a HF than taking a quant job acting like a programming machine in front of screens... Consulting should be a reasonable option based on the alumni information i've got in hand. However, I'd like to be financial-related to a larger extent. So maybe I can represent my question this way: is it possible for a Chem PhD to get a job in IB research area, which is quite a natural springboard for entering HF?

Thanks in advance!

It's definitely possible. Some companies such as GS are probably better for this type of switch than others.

Got it! Thanks very much aachimp!