Tough Career Decisions

Hi Everyone,

I'm in a bit of a situation here guys, not really sure what to do here. I'm currently graduating from a top 3 ECE / CS /Comp Fi program with an ECE major, CS minor, Comp Fi minor. Right now it looks like I will have offers to SIG, AllianceBern, Citi, and GS all for tech roles. Are any of these worth jumping on right now?

Do you guys think I would do better for myself to take a year in grad school, finish my masters, and pick my GPA up significantly? (@ arounda 3.0 now)

This depends a lot on financials, but assuming all of those options are available, what do you think sounds good? My interests lie in doing some combination of Math and Computer Science - I think algo trading development would be a very good fit for me, but I can't seem to even get interviewed there.

The problem I have working somewhere like SIG is I feel like a lot of their developers are bitches for the traders and don't do what I might call interesting work, can anybody who has worked there comment on this?

Thanks everybody, Graham

4 Comments
 

tech is all not that bad...work there for a few years, be glad you have a job, and just keep your options open, you will find "algo trading" opportunities in the future. i would go with GS on that one, but then again if you get stuck with doing their proprietary languages and stuff, then that might suck.

do you understand what "algo trading" is or what it entails? i feel like a lot of people throw that term around, but don't really know what it is. make sure that is really what you want to do.

 

I believe I know what it is. It's working closely with quants and traders to develop strategies that act more or less by themselves as market makers.

I'd also be very interested in doing more slow-paced sort of research like quant work. I don't really know if I'm cut out for trading but I want to be programming something I consider to be interesting work, where the speed that my code runs at is very important, I can apply theoretical math / CS knowledge, etc.

Is this a fair interpretation, I'd be very curious to hear what you have to say if you have experience.

Do you know what exit opportunities would look like coming out of SIG? Do they have good training for tech / is there room to move into more quant roles?

 
Best Response

welcome to the industry man, you're not going to do ground breaking theoretical math/CS work here - unless your'e a PhD from MIT. SIG i'm assuming you have a tech role there. I've heard their program is 2 yrs or something, and your job security is not guaranteed. But since SIG is a small firm, you'd learn a lot there. I'd honestly go with GS if i were you, their training program is really good. Work there for a couple of years, and if the market gets better you'll get other ops. Do a CFA or MBA or something (or even an FRM - that might be something you want to look into), network a lot, and you'll be fine.

 

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