I am a bit of a crossroads in my career, I realize that I am going to have to pick a specific area to specialize in and I have no idea what path I should take. I am currently working as an analyst doing Commercial Lending and I have realized this isn’t the path for me. I am in my mid-20s and feel that I need to start getting experience in the area that I will have a career in.
I had a Mechanical Engineering degree and I passed the 3rd exam last June (1st attempt on all, not sure if it means anything to employers). I am over 2 years of work experience away from being eligible to get my charter. The reason for the lack of work experience is that I played poker as a source of income during school and after graduating. This has also caused my resume to be a bit thin. Outside my current role I have only really had two jobs during school with a power company in an engineering role. My marks in engineering are also pretty average, a function of playing poker rather than studying. Once I started studying for the CFA exams I realized how little effort I put in for engineering. I also have some programming knowledge, I have a strong knowledge of VBA and a basic understanding of Python, SQL and R.
As for what kind of work I’d like to do, I’m sure it’s obvious I am very analytical and like problem solving. Ideally I would like to be working in a role where these two skills are required. While I am able to deal with clients, I don’t think I would be best suited for a client-facing role.
I appreciate any help or guidance that anyone is able to offer.
I have a very similar path, i have an engeeneering degree from quite a good school but with quite low grades due to playing poker during those years ( >30hours/week) . I specialized in finance during the last year of my engeeneering schoold. I took 1.5 year off after school to play poker professionally.
I Started the CFA while trying to get back into the job market before it was too late (1 Y gap was already hard to explain). I found a job in Risk management, ( Validation of Credit Risk models) and i enjoy it but i would rather recommend market risk to be more intellectually challenged.
Wait so is this normal? People study engineering and get bad grades from playing poker too much?
Anyway, I sort of agree that these corporate sort of positions with “soft” quantitative requirements are probably the best fit in terms of your experience. You don’t have enough math in your background to do quant work, and most trading or asset managing positions want some sort of finance work experience.
Ohai. Usually an engineering degree has a lot of math in it. How are you concluding that the OP doesn’t have enough math to do quant work? It’s not at all clear to me that this is the case, although something like an MFE would presumably help with the finance-quant-specific applications.
It seems like an MFE would be a sensible approach, with the caveat that the job market for quant has an oversupply of candidates, so there’s no guarantee of payoffs.
There is probably some type of job that involves math that is accessible to normal engineering graduates. However, almost all true quant jobs that I have seen require a PhD in a quantitative subject - 100% of my quants have PhDs, for instance. A few even have a PhD and MFE.