Absolutely No Finance Experience
Hi,
I'm pretty desperate and I was hoping you guys could help me out.
I am a rising junior and I go to a target school. I am a math major and I had always thought that I would wind up in math research, but the last 6 months of my life really changed my mind. After a considerable amount of research and thought, I have realized that I would really like to break into the world of trading.
Unfortunately, being that I had only finished making up my mind this summer, I was not able to get a summer internship doing anything finance related at all. All of my experience/clubs/anything is either in bioinformatics or math research. To make matters worse, I also have a pretty low gpa of 3.25 (no excuses, I was just a huuuuge idiot my first two years of college).
So now I desperately need any kind of finance experience. Does anybody have any suggestions for what I should do next? I feel like I am so behind and screwed beyond belief. Am I too inexperienced to seriously participate in junior year recruiting? I do go to a school where like half of our graduates go onto wall street so the competition is pretty intense...
Go join an investment club on campus. Take a few finance-related classes.
But honestly, your GPA will screw you over even if you had experience. Sorry that's the blunt truth.
In trading, especially prop trading, people are willing to overlook your low GPA if you're truly smart. So the question for you is if you have anything that proves you're smart (publications, putnam exam results, grad school coursework)
Also, many people enter trading with no finance experience. Usually these are for the more quantitative shops.
I actually know I guy who got into trading with OK math skills, low GPA, and beginners programming skills. But he won some crazy video game competitions or something and the traders loved how he put so much time into thinking up strategies that he eventually networked his way into a top prop shop. He also rocked brain teasers that didn't require a advanced math - the same kind of out of the box thinking he did with video games..
First of all, a 3.25 isn't really that low. It doesn't help a lot, but it doesn't put you out of the running. It's good that you're gonna be a junior and not a senior since a lot of Wall Street banks seem to make their IB and trading hires right out of their summer intern class. If you're truly interested in trading, read up on it and study it so that you can kill the interviews. It seems like your target school isn't worth devoting too much of your energy towards the OCR. Go to it, but assume it won't help. Networking is the way to get your foot in the door. Use some contacts you have and if you don't have any, build some up. Especially if you come from a non-traditional background, you have to do non-traditional things.
You are far too kind. 3.25 is crap. Heck, even 3.5 is only borderline acceptable, especially in terms of recruiting.
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