| Topic Name: |
PhD or Work |
| Message Name: |
Difficult Decisions |
| Date Posted: |
08/17/2002 |
| In Reply To: |
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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| Message: |
You don??t say how close you are to finishing your PhD.... My bias is that higher education is always a good thing. Some may disagree. Yeah, I know. Bill Gates is a college dropout. Well, how many of us are Bill Gates?
I??m wondering how confident you are about the long-term prospects at this company. Or even short-term prospects? What if you sign on with them and, 5 mos. later, the economy is still stuck or ?? worse ?? continues rolling downhill? Would you be one of the last-in, first-out layoff prospects? Or maybe the job would be just short-term ?? a start toward moving to a sell-side firm? If so, do you have a specific plan about how you will do that? Is this the best place to move from/build on?
I understand the conflict of having a good income vs. continuing to be a ??starving student.?? It??s a difficult decision (one that I, too, fretted over in college despite my clear view of what I wanted when I started college). I resolved it by remembering that my original vision for myself involved work that fulfilled a certain purpose. In my case, it was certain values and ends that had a deep meaning for me. That was my thing. It may not be yours. One general bit of advice I can give you is to leap forward a bit in your imagination ?? what??s the ultimate, long-term goal ?? where do you want to be in 10 yrs/20 yrs? Ideally, if you can create whatever you want, what would it look like that far in the future? And then start asking questions such as: how would taking this job now fit into that? If you take this job, what would be the next steps (toward that goal) and would this job make those steps easier or not? Would staying in school now be beneficial to that goal or not?
The biggest question you can ask yourself around either side of this dilemma is: what??s the fear? Fear is what keeps us stuck. Fear also shuts down your creative thinking. Is there some way that you can create a third option for yourself? Brainstorm it. List all ideas without censoring them ?? like, would it be possible to work part-time for them AND continue your PhD? What other "ideal world" options can you think of?
I really recommend informational interviews for answers to some of your questions (like whether PhDs are stuck at SVP level in boring jobs or if the degree will block you from jr-level jobs that lead to higher potential). ID some people who will have answers for you and ask for 20 min. of their time ?? phone or in person.
My very best wishes,
Jane
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