- Joined
- 8/30/22
- Messages
- 8
- Points
- 1
Hi all,
This is my first post here and I'm looking for some advice. In three years I will get my PhD in PURE math from a very top university (if everything goes smoothly, ofc!). When I started the PhD my intention was to pursue a career in academia, but I subsequently changed my mind and came to realize that actually the academic route is not for me, for several reasons but mainly because of low pay, and I started to get informed about jobs in finance. Ideally, after I graduate I would like to join a top quant hedge fund like 2sigma, DE Shaw or Renaissance.
At the moment my coding skills and my knowledge of stats are both very basic, but, if I decide to go down this route, I believe that three years is enough time for me to improve.
However, I have recently been told (by an ex employee at one of those funds with a background very similar to mine) that those jobs are not as good as they might appear, for the following two (related) reasons:
1) there is a lot of instability. The risk of getting laid off after 5 years is real and somewhat outside of your control.
2) there is no clear path to career advancement toward PM.
According to him, working as a quant at those places is a bit like being in a limbo: very high starting salary but little room for growth and a lot of uncertainty about the future. He himself left (or was let go, I did not get that) for a leetcoding job in tech. Always according to him, the pay in tech is also good and the job is more secure, but career-wise you're even more set on a dead-end path, meaning that you should not expect any further promotions/advancements after the age of 40-45.
His advice for me was to actually go in another direction: get a top MBA and try to make it into a managerial role. Actually, this was one alternative I was already considering before speaking with him, since coming from a pure math background for the time being I still don't have the professional knowledge required for any job, and I am only slightly closer to a techincal role than I am to a managerial one, meaning that my current skill set is not good for any of them, and that I would need to retrain in both case, either as a software engineer/data scientist (which I could presumably do in my free time) or as a manager (by means of an MBA). (At the moment, my only knowledge of finance is in option pricing (CAPM, discrete time, Black Scholes -- I know this well) which unfortunately is a topic that quant hedge funds seem not to care about.)
What are your thoughts on all of this? I welcome any suggestions or observations. Thanks!
This is my first post here and I'm looking for some advice. In three years I will get my PhD in PURE math from a very top university (if everything goes smoothly, ofc!). When I started the PhD my intention was to pursue a career in academia, but I subsequently changed my mind and came to realize that actually the academic route is not for me, for several reasons but mainly because of low pay, and I started to get informed about jobs in finance. Ideally, after I graduate I would like to join a top quant hedge fund like 2sigma, DE Shaw or Renaissance.
At the moment my coding skills and my knowledge of stats are both very basic, but, if I decide to go down this route, I believe that three years is enough time for me to improve.
However, I have recently been told (by an ex employee at one of those funds with a background very similar to mine) that those jobs are not as good as they might appear, for the following two (related) reasons:
1) there is a lot of instability. The risk of getting laid off after 5 years is real and somewhat outside of your control.
2) there is no clear path to career advancement toward PM.
According to him, working as a quant at those places is a bit like being in a limbo: very high starting salary but little room for growth and a lot of uncertainty about the future. He himself left (or was let go, I did not get that) for a leetcoding job in tech. Always according to him, the pay in tech is also good and the job is more secure, but career-wise you're even more set on a dead-end path, meaning that you should not expect any further promotions/advancements after the age of 40-45.
His advice for me was to actually go in another direction: get a top MBA and try to make it into a managerial role. Actually, this was one alternative I was already considering before speaking with him, since coming from a pure math background for the time being I still don't have the professional knowledge required for any job, and I am only slightly closer to a techincal role than I am to a managerial one, meaning that my current skill set is not good for any of them, and that I would need to retrain in both case, either as a software engineer/data scientist (which I could presumably do in my free time) or as a manager (by means of an MBA). (At the moment, my only knowledge of finance is in option pricing (CAPM, discrete time, Black Scholes -- I know this well) which unfortunately is a topic that quant hedge funds seem not to care about.)
What are your thoughts on all of this? I welcome any suggestions or observations. Thanks!