| Topic Name: |
PhD or Work |
| Message Name: |
finPHD or work programmer now? |
| Date Posted: |
08/12/2002 |
| In Reply To: |
Dear jase,
BUT could you get an IB job in the near future? Things don't look very good out there.... Aside from that, though, I'm a firm believer in grabbing opportunities that are dropped in our laps. They often lead to more unexpected good stuff. This sounds like a prestigious offer. AND a full scholarship! Sounds like it might be just the spot to ride out economic woes. Who knows where the IB biz will be in a year or 2?
Wondering what about IB is so attractive that you might pass this up for that?
Give this some careful thought if you're leaning toward turning it down. In fact, if you want to email me, we can set up a free 30-min coaching session to help you sort some of this out.
Jane
jane@decideonsuccess.com |
| Message: |
I want to ask some serious questions here. And I will appreciate very much to some sincere feedbacks or advices, ideally from direct experiences.
I am a finance Phd student in a second tie business school. I am currently interning in a very successful buy side firm, doing some financial modeling work. The company is one of the most sophisticated buyside fixed income houses with a growing AUM of 250 billion. They are very dependent and aggressive on their proprietary valuation/risk management modeling and trading systems, which really distinguishes them from the other beasts in the buyside jungle. My part of the work involves some forefront implementation and innovations on the academic researches in derivatives and valuation on the backbone of the whole integrated system with C .
Like any Finance PhDs who???? determined to progress in wall street, I want to go to the capital market and business side instead of staying in the back office modeling and coding work all my life. My ultimate career goal is to leverage my quant finance skills while building up my market experiences and business skills. And the best way I can think of now, is to go to a sell-side bank working in either derivative structuring job in credit derivative/ or whatever war/terrorism/political derivatives that might be hot now or soon or to go to a derivative strategy group, and get experiences in market. I want to progress my career either inside the sellside up (is it true that PhDs are caped at the SVP level and they will do some of the most boring jobs in Banks?) or go to buyside joining a hedge fund.
Right now, I had some serious career choices. Pretty soon, the head of my company will push me for decision of back to my Finance PhD track or stay for a full time job here perfectionise its modeling and tradign systems coding and implementing, which means I will quit my PhD in finance immediately and I will enter this shitty job market without a decent degree to hedge my career risk.
Should I take this job? Or should I go back to my PhD and finish it? Some people having PhDs in finance actually regretted to have the PhD, because it blocks the way to some of the more junior jobs that leads to a higher potential (sales and trading, etc.). Once you have a big PhD on your resume, people tends to corner you into the back office modeling jobs and the liquidity on your career track is limited to the minimum. If I take this job, I will have to eventually at some stage get a decent degree somewhere, which I don;t have now.
I am not expecting definite answers. Everyone take their own career risks and make decisions themselves, but right now, it???? just that my decision information set is Too limited. I would like to hear from people with all kinds of background on opinions and observations of the value of a second tie finance Phd on wall street. So, I can have a clearer view of the trade-offs of back to PhD or working now as a programmer in this company.
I don;t know if I am short selling myself to this company now. But, people suggest me to ask for a job not less than 150K per year, to me, for now, it is big money now compared with barely survival PhD scholarships.
thanks a lot.
wolawola.
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