Pure math PhD to go for consulting or quant job?

Hi all!

I'm just over halfway through my PhD in pure maths, and have always envisioned myself as going for a career in academia. Unfortunately, a physical illness and a subsequent depression has damaged my passion for the subject so that I'm now looking for something just a bit farther away from the Ivory Tower. I'm just beginning to explore my options, and am hoping for a more varied, fast-paced, socially stimulating, and hopefully better paid career path. Unless I reconsider and end up staying in academia, I'm so far thinking either consulting (and possibly an MBA after a bit of work experience), or a quant role in a hedge fund or the like. I'd be really grateful for some advice on which goal to pursue, and a realistic plan to get there. The following is some additional info on my situation:

Strengths: Will have a PhD in math. Nearly perfect undergrad grades. Good at most standardized tests (got the percentile equivalent of a perfect 800 score on my country's "SAT"). Good verbal skills. Good work ethic. Some extra-curricular experience from various non-profits and non-STEM courses.

Weaknesses: Very non-applied background; know very little statistics and programming. PhD thesis will probably be rather mediocre (because of the aforementioned health problems and some bad luck with research topics). Little experience of leadership roles. At non-negligible risk of more health problems down the road. Currently a bit lost in life, and not very passion-driven.

I have already seen some very valuable advice on this forum that pertains to similar situations, but because there are many different nuances to the matter I'm still wondering about the following: What could I, in light of the above, expect from the respective career choices in terms of chances of success, fulfillment and pay? How to I get off to a good (relative to circumstances) start in the respective cases (additional courses to take during/after the PhD, entry level positions to apply for etc)? Where am I likely to find myself in, say, 10 years from now in the respective case? I live in northern Europe but have no qualms about relocating.

Thanks!

 

Not to be too inquisitive.... but what kind of illness makes you not fit to go into academia but allows you to be successful in consulting or HF? It seems like the lifestyle is a lot worse (although money is obviously better).

From a recruiting perspective... lots of quant shops hire highly theoretical people with little to no training in finance. I don't know what kind of stats bias they have, but I do assume there's some.

Not saying that's where you should set your sights, but have you ever read about Renaissance?

 

Well, my reasons are psychological rather than medical, and threefold. Firstly, I'm more cynical than I used to be, which makes the more idealistic vocation of the pure researcher less appealing to me. Secondly, I suppose I just feel like doing something different; if the set of possible lives is partially ordered with respect to quality, the life of sick me will be less than that of healthy me if I try to follow the same trajectory, but incomparable to it if I do something different. Thirdly, I'm thinking that in case I "fail" in one way or another, I'm still more likely to make a decent living if I do something applied rather than stay in academia (perhaps this is wrong though?).

Yes, Renaissance did ring a bell, but I'll look further into it! I suppose something like their "research scientist" position (can't post the link) could be a possibility. Is this a "quant job" but under a different name? If not, how does it compare?

 
Best Response

I'm a CS and Math undergrad at a top school who's looked into the quant path. Coming from a pure background, you should have no trouble picking up statistics. I'm sure your Ph.D. program has covered the basics, take a few more courses if you can. It sounds like you have extended your Ph.D. time because of your health issues (which is absolutely the right thing to do) so why not extend a little further to have more time for statistics.

As for programming, don't worry about it. Your stat courses will teach you R, Python, and/or Matlab and that's all you'll need for a quant job. If not, you can learn it on your own. You don't even need to understand algorithms, you just need to be capable to writing scripts to use data. All three languages have very extensive libraries that make it easy to build complex models (e.g. TensorFlow, SciPy, NumPy). Besides, if you do need something faster, you would just as an engineer to make it for you.

 

Ok, that doesn't sound too bad! Looking at the rather dire reading list presented at Quant Start, it would seem that I would need to take a lot more courses, but perhaps you can get by with less than that? Because of stubbornness I went back to work before I was sufficiently recovered (which in retrospect was unwise). Therefore I'm a bit stressed about my research and will probably try to take any additional courses I need during a semester/year after my PhD is finished.

 

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