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Types of PhD - test data

bendort

Joined
8/12/08
Messages
9
Points
11
Hello,

I have about a year of PhD/RA work left and am planning what to do when I'm finished. I've been looking into becoming a quant and just ordered the books etc with a plan to have a good knowledge of this industry by the time I finish next year.

However, most of the discussions seem to be about Maths or Physics PhDs, my PhD will be in Computer Science and is very applied rather than theoretical. My undergraduate degree was in Astrophysics. Am I going to be at a disadvantage to people with maths and physics PhD's (i.e. is it worth me pursuing this career choice?).

Secondly, is there anyway to prove your potential as a quant, such as coding up different algorithms. Do companies hold competitions or do financial institutes ever release data that can be used to test different algorithms on?

Also I'm in the UK just in case this makes a difference to the answers?!

Thanks,
Ben
 
Computer Science is also very very useful. To put it into perspective, Renaissance Technologies likes Math/Physics and CompSci phDs.
 
dude, whatever you do, try to learn it really really well. That's my advice. What is your thesis about?

BTW, the head of research in my group is an Astrophysics PhD.
 
My thesis is in Computer Vision, basically I do non-invasive tracking of people from a single camera (for surveillance purposes or markerless motion capture). This seems a bit unrelated, but I think there's definately some overlap. Also we do quite a lot of work to try and achieve real-time performance, so optimising of code/algorithms. I'll give the books a read when they arrive, but I'm pretty sure I'll be learning 99% of the material from scratch!!
 
Computer vision... I did some pattern recognition in the past (10+ years ago) but I almost forgot every thing that had to do with image processing (I started doing voice).

The knowlege is completely transferable. Polish C++ and Matlab. They are going to be useful. Check your kalman filters/digital filtering of any kind. Check anything that has to do with Time Series and signal processing. Your knowledge will be better suitable for that type of job (stat arb, portfolio optimization, portfolio selection, high freq trading, etc) that for pricing/structuring jobs.
 
BTW, since you are in the UK, try to contact this people Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.

They use OCaml to do Math and other stuff in your field. The main guy there is extremely bright person. I have his books. If you learn everything in OCaml and with your background in EE and pattern recognition, this company ( Jane Street Capital, LLC ) might hire you in a heart beat.
 
However, most of the discussions seem to be about Maths or Physics PhDs, my PhD will be in Computer Science and is very applied rather than theoretical. My undergraduate degree was in Astrophysics. Am I going to be at a disadvantage to people with maths and physics PhD's (i.e. is it worth me pursuing this career choice?).
Click to expand...

No, you're not at a disadvantage. If anything, PH.D.s in pure math are at a disadvantage. I assume you've the usual math background of a UK physics graduate: ODEs, PDEs, special functions, numerical analysis, probability and statistics. Plus you have the essential computing background. The math used in math finance isn't that difficult.
 
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