Career path for computer science student?
I'm a computer science master's student at a state university. I'll be doing an internship with Google this summer, so landing a full-time position in IT likely won't be a big problem. However, I took part in a trading competition held by a prominent prop shop and I realized I'm very interested in quantatative trading. I'm wondering what career path I can take to break into the financial industry. I've thought of a few, but I'm not sure how practical they are:
1. Join a HFT hedge fund / prop shop as software engineer and gain experience / connection, eventually switching to a trading-related position.
2. Take CFA Lvl1 in June (to show that I have some knowledge in finance) and look for a quantatative analyst position.
3. Apply for a MFE / MF program and go into the job market in another 2 years' time.
I think path 1 best utilizes my technical background, but I'm not so sure about how easy it is to transfer from an IT position to a more front-desk position. Also, I heard the IT people are not regarded very highly in some companies. As for path 2, I guess a CFA level 1 would show that I'm not completely ignorant in finance. However, from what I've heard they look for mostly math/stat PhDs for quant analyst positions.
Going into another grad program would mean that I won't be earning any salary for at least two more years, which is acceptable for me, but probably not really worth it unless it is super helpful to my career.
Internship at Google is impressive, congratulations!
Back to your question about breaking into finance as a SE:
Joining HF/prop shop as SE and lateraling inside is an option, however, based on my knowledge this is how work there is structured. 1. Most SE roles there are responsible for operations - read execution, risk desks, data feeds processing, and so forth. Usually SEs rewrite strategies written by quants/data scientists from their low-speed algos to high-speed algos using C/C++/Java, etc. 2. Going this path require a lot of effort to get proficient, since those languages are hard and stakes are high. Moreover most of the other industries don't need those skills, unless you want to transfer into GPU programming, close-to-hardware software, NASA rovers' software.. 3. Is there a way to pivot your education towards math/stats, so it's more aligned with requirements that shops are looking for in their quants? 4. One of my friends actually went this route, and now pivoting from risk desk into trading execution desk roles. Lots of programming anyway, and it's unknown whether new role is going to become a profit center in first place.
Take CFA Level 1 and look for a quantatative analyst position. 1. Do you really need CFA Level 1 to pursue this route? CFA Level one is a lot about ethics and so forth. 2. As a master in computer science you should know enough to apply for those roles as of now. Reading through CFA might be useful, but stats textbook is going to be better use of your time.
Apply for a MFE / MF program and go into the job market in another 2 years' time. I think this is going to be a waste of time.
Overall, I think the best way for you would be to work really hard to get an offer from Google and work there for 2-3 years. See whether you like it or not, see what other people are thinking about there. Network and find other people who are interested in quantitative trading, work with them, do side after work projects with them, write few profitable strategies, and see how it goes.
Thinking about profitable strategies. Some of my quant friends talked a lot about prop shops interview process. It seems like a lot of shops are hunting for people that have profitable strategies developed earlier, so they could recreate same/similar strategies at the new firm as well...
Hope this helps!
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