I am a 3rd year banking analyst, with little quant knowledge and trying to get rid of the long working hours and pursue a job with better work-life balance and not much pay-cut. I personally is quite good with numbers and have some science background.
Luckily I got admitted to a top MFE program in US, which will graduate in 2015, and I am making the tough go-no-go decision now. I would like you senior monkeys' insights and predicts on the job market, esp. quant trading at that time. I think the move is more of a location/job nature change for me, so highly dependent on the sentiment that time. Appreciate your help in advance!
Ask @IlliniProgrammer
Ask http://www.quantnet.com
Ask http://www.quantnet.com
How does that compare to http://www.nuclearphynance.com/ and http://www.wilmott.com/ ?
They're good sites too, but Andy know his stuff.
Quant trading will be tough without good programming chops which take several years to practice. However, there are some great markets related positions which are more sales and trading than quant trading/programming. If you think you can get promoted in IB staying where you are, I would ask the MFE program if you can defer for a year and then decide later.
BB global markets programs are definitely hard to get but I think your chances are better out of an MFE than an MBA. An MBA is much more diversified however and will open doors for you across many industries in strategy and corporate development (very different path from quant careers).
I think the MBA vs. MFE decision is based on what you want out of your career.
I have always been of the view that the best way to advance in a career is to largely focus on technical skills so you can create hard value. The soft skills, the friends, the connections are something you just tend to pick up through hard work.
I think MBAs are a great tool in an industry where search and discovery costs are expensive (often these are industries that tend to have a lot of salespeople). I think MFEs are a better tool in an industry where data is cheap and freely available and analysis is expensive.
If you suck at interpersonal skills, don't do an MBA. If you suck at math, don't do an MFE.
Princeton is an interesting program that falls somewhere in between an MBA and an MFE on the spectrum. The program is pretty flexible and allows you to take everything from CS courses to Stats courses to Econ to, of course, ORFE. (Actually four of the five core courses are in the ORFE department.)
Booth and CMU Tepper also have MBAs that you can kind of steer quantitative, I believe.
Great post Illini- yeah, I think from an academic content standpoint, there's no question that any MFE program will be miles and miles ahead of any MBA program. People do the MBA basically 100% for access to recruiters and signalling value (doing a top MBA is fairly trivial but getting in is not).
I think Princeton has the best program for a career in finance there is. That said, besides Stanford (which is winding down its finmath program), Princeton is very, very difficult to get into. I think Columbia Business School has a masters in financial economics now and the acceptance rate is something crazy like 2%. But the CBS program seems overpriced given the lack of access to CBS MBA on-campus recruiting and the hurdles that someone has to clear to get admitted (might as well just do the PhD at a top school or drop out of the PhD).
Just a note, Stanford FinMath isn't truly winding down, I think. It is changing from an interdepartmental major organized by Stats to being run by ICME though.
Correct. The MBA curriculum in general is fairly easy if you come from a solid background. Obviously it's admissions into a top program that acts as a powerful signal to recruiters, hence one reason why they flock to the top schools every year.
The CBS masters in financial economics is very new, so its market value is rather untested. Most of the students are foreigners, which is not too surprising. From what I've gathered it caters mostly to those who are recently out of undergrad while Princeton and Berkeley are more open to older candidates.
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