[Advice Needed] Best Path for Non-Target School Undergraduates

[Allonsygamma]

Hi guys,
My question is about the optimal path or strategy for undergraduate students from a non-target school who want to enter the Quant industry.

To give you a brief background, I'm from a Top 50 university on the East Coast, majoring in Computer Science. My original plan was to pursue a Ph.D. after graduation, and I published a few top conference papers in NLP and ML Theory during my freshman and sophomore years. This was followed by two internships as a software engineer at a small company and a Diversity Program at Google Research. I am now looking to change my career path and plan to look for a quant trader position.

I'd like to ask what I can do to maximize my chances of getting a trader job with my background, and I'd welcome any advice anyone can leave, thank you!

Edit:
Since I transferred, my GPA is currently 4.0. My course content was decent, very much a Grad Level course, and the math fundamentals were barely decent.
I'm sorry I don't know if that's enough information

 

[Allonsygamma]

I know that I don't have a sufficient education background, however, for some personal reasons, I can not afford to take a master in MFE

 

[weab]

just apply and practice your brainteasers

 

[MRoss]

On paper you've already been rejected since you are all CS not quant.

But don't let that stop you. Build your own algo and start trading. Create a section on the very top of your resume called:

Quant Trading Algo

Describe your process broken down by bullets and how you manage risk, produce reports, and how well your portfolio is performing.


This section is/will be more important than your education or experiences.

 

[Allonsygamma]

On paper you've already been rejected since you are all CS not quant.

But don't let that stop you. Build your own algo and start trading. Create a section on the very top of your resume called:

Quant Trading Algo

Describe your process broken down by bullets and how you manage risk, produce reports, and how well your portfolio is performing.


This section is/will be more important than your education or experiences.

Hi MRoss,
Thank you! You explained your opinions very clearly. I have a simple following question: what materials/books/websites that you recommended for learning Algo trading? Since I have been programming with Python for many many years, I plan to construct my trading system/algo w Python. Thank you so much!

 

[MRoss]

Hi MRoss,
Thank you! You explained your opinions very clearly. I have a simple following question: what materials/books/websites that you recommended for learning Algo trading? Since I have been programming with Python for many many years, I plan to construct my trading system/algo w Python. Thank you so much!

I am not the person to answer that question, sorry. But pretty much everyone else here should be able to assist.