I have a dream – To be a Financial Engineer

‘To study as high as possible, you will have more chances to achieve better quality of life.’ This axiom has been widely accepted in my country or even in majority of Asia. So it is no strange that I will take this to heart and want to pursue my master degree. Next question is which field will be both challenging and rewarding financially. The answer would be very subtle and depend on individuals. For me, a person with engineering background, Math and Computer programming are my preferences. And these skills will have more additional values if they are applied to Finance area. I discovered this when I learned of ‘Financial Engineering’ a few years back.

If I went out to the street (of course not Wall Street) and told people that I wanted to study Financial engineering in my country few years ago, they would be puzzled with the strange term. With little knowledge about FE in Thailand where I live, I garnered more information from several reliable sources and Quantnet.com is one of them. More perception about FE, more intimidation and inspiration arose in the same time. It seems to be very difficult and intriguing at the same time. By the way, I thought this career path would fulfill my expectation and a good fit to my preference. Eventually, I made a decision to overcome those fear and pursue my dream as a ‘Financial Engineer’.

The journey to gain something very crucial and meaningful to you is always not easy and smooth, mine either. To earn a FE degree, US programs seem to be a better choice. However the tuition is pretty high if you have no scholarships. Therefore I start to set aside huge amount of money by working abroad, thanks to my company (ASM Technology Singapore) who gave me a reasonable emolument and irreplaceable experiences. Apart from the tuition, I need to take couples of standard exams. For my country where English is not an official language, it is not easy to obtain a good GRE score. I really appreciated my GRE instructor whose wonderful techniques and strategies helped boost my score by 200 points within 10 days.

The next process is to find the schools which fit my preferences and provide good teaching quality Since I have no experience in US school admission process before, I missed some deadline by the good programs. I tried my best to get into the remaining available schools. Each school has its own selection process and requirements. Some need video presentation; some may require three kinds of statements of purpose and so on. I spent a lot of my time day and night in preparation and put a lot of efforts into it. Eventually my endeavor paid off; I was accepted into the MFE program at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Though it is an inaugural class and a lot of people still do not know about its quality and hesitate to join, I heartfelt believe in UIUC. And I will put all of my effort to make the program to be one of a good ‘Financial Engineering’ program which people yearn for. I promise.

Thanks to my family for their continued support and toleration to my persistence.

Tags: financial engineering, illinois mfe, Piyapong, Thailand, uiuc, UIUC MFE

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