Career guidance

[rabit]

Hi All,

I am seeking career guidance here. I am looking forward career in Mathematical Finance. I wish to deal with Maths and Programming more than finance itself. I want to be at technical side(Quant/Developer). Can you please guide me varius options available?

I live in India and want to work here itself. I cant go for MFE programs due to the constraint that I cant leave India. So please let me know what are options available to progress towords career path outlined above.

I researched and got the following options:
1.CQF: Costly,not sure how much it is recognised in India.
2.Actuaries:Big time investment(I can do that without issue) ,not sure if it can help me to land in IB,derivatives,hedge funds.(not inclined to work for Life insurance,employee benifit sector)

My Background:
Electronics and Telecomm Engineer from Mumbai University.
Working as Risk analyst in Credit card risk managment.(2 years)
Planning to appear for FRM , nov2011

Thanks

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Looks like programming skill is your key to open these jobs. Plenty of people work in FO of big banks that have a presence in India. More often than not, the graduates of IITs in hard subjects end up in these roles.
No need to do CQF or actuarial exams.
How soon can you get your coding level up? Look for mid office/back office IT roles in banks there. There are always a need for these people.

 

[rabit]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for your response. I am not from IIT.I wish to get some more exposure to financial maths. I dont want to switch to pure IT job. Looking forward towords Modelling type of profile.

 

[rabit]

the thing is the question for me in is no MFE then wht?
What can get closer to it being in India?

Please share your views.

 

[Jojo]

not sure but Indian Statistical Institutes (ISI) offer Masters in quantitative Economics...MSQE...good combination of econometrics and applied statistics...ISI is a great brand too.

 

[Jojo]

but at the end of the day..if you wanna be in India and work there...probably getting an MBA in finance from one of the IIMs or other good institutes is the best thing to go for...even for quant roles.

 

[Devdeep]

but at the end of the day..if you wanna be in India and work there...probably getting an MBA in finance from one of the IIMs or other good institutes is the best thing to go for...even for quant roles.

Second that... @rabit... if you can get into an IIM that is good for Finance... you will be set... I believe...

 

[rabit]

Thanks Devdeep, If not IIM then what are other options? (Not inclined to do MBA as of now)

 

[Shantanu Kumar]

@rabit
Either you need to show you have a good background in mathematics or you need to have a big brand name associated with you to land a job in quantitative finance because most of these positions(haredcore quant) in India has been occupied by Computer Science graduates from IITs.
Rest of the people who work in this field are either with background in hardcore mathematics from some Kolkata university /ISI/ IISC.Then there are also economics student from top colleges of Delhi University.
As people have already pointed out that for you IIM is the best available option.I don´t know whether students from other B schools are working in this area or not.

 

[rabit]

Thanks for the inputs.

So for good background in Maths can be proved by below?

I researched and got the following options:
1.CQF: Costly,not sure how much it is recognised in India.
2.Actuaries:Big time investment(I can do that without issue) ,not sure if it can help me to land in IB,derivatives,hedge funds.(not inclined to work for Life insurance,employee benifit sector)

 

[Shantanu Kumar]

Also i think you will be needing a very good networking to land job in this field as i hardly see these companies advertising their quant position on the job sites.
CQF will defintely be better.