Phd in the quant job

[Tiasilverman]

Hi guys,
according to you, how much is important having a Phd for a quant job? What are the best Phd (finance or financial engineering) for having the best career in the quant world?

 

[Keith Tan]

no such thing as best phd or best career. it is up to you what "best" means to you.

 

[TehRaio]

again and again and again, don't do a PhD with industry career in mind.
do a PhD because you want to teach and/or do research,
god damnit think of the poor ugrad students who'll have to deal with you (lol)

 

[IntoDarkness]

well, for some of those part-time phds, industry career is not just simply "in mind" but the sole goal...

 

[Liam]

Understand what a PhD is before asking such a question. It's a topic in depth for 3-4 years. As such, the "best" phd is one where

A) it's something you like
B) something you're prepared to lecture or research in if you don't become a quant. Face facts, this positivity stuff of "you can do anything" careers advisors bombard people with is horseshit and one of my quant bosses even used to say about some people we interviewed on with strong maths backgrounds "they'll never become a quant" if they don't have a classical quant background. Also, a PhD can lead to a narrower range of options than a degree in hr would. If markets are ok, it's not an issue. If markets flop you'll be scrambling around looking for alternatives that may not exist.

Also on B) this business of planning to go into Job 1, Job 2,... quant or Phd/Msc/MFE -> quant that I sometimes see on boards like this is fraught with risk. Risk the map to quant you're planning is out of date. Risk that map will change over those 3-5 years of research. And risk you spend so much time job hunting that you don't finish the phd. Anyone I know that did well in industry from phd had originally planned to lecture and stay in research and went into industry because lecturing isn't all it's cracked up to be, not as part of a plan to be a quant prior to phd, sorry.

 

[TehRaio]

I think in france they have what they call a "Thèse CIFRE" which basically allows you to pursue a professional PhD: the bank pays your salary and you work on a PhD project that's a cooperation between the school and the bank.

So you do quantitative research but you're paid like a PhD student, once you're out you have basically 3 years of experience on your resume.

 

[C S]

People like to hire people that are like themselves. A lot of PhDs in finance are those that attempted to make it to academic stardom and failed. Hiring processes for PhDs often involve the input of a PhD at some senior level; hiring processes that don't involve a PhD manager are likely to even discriminate against PhDs as being overqualified. It basically takes a PhD, or someone who knows PhDs and wasn't turned off of them, to want to hire another PhD.

So in order to get hired in finance with a PhD, you need to be "like" one of these PhDs. And they don't want to hire someone that got a PhD so they could get a job on Wall St. Anybody with a somewhat sensitive nose can smell the difference between the two types.

I overheard a PhD quant guy the other day asking his underlings whether they knew Polya's recurrence theorem, and none of them did. The atmosphere was just dripping with his disappointment. When this guy looks for someone to hire (and in fact, the reason he asked whether they knew this theorem is because of some interview questions he was asking PhD guys), he is looking to hire somebody that can sit around discussing different proofs of this theorem like in this Math Overflow thread:
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/165056/how-many-proofs-of-the-polyas-recurrent-theorem-are-there

If you aren't looking to be this type of PhD, these types of guys aren't going to hire you. Plain and simple.