Need some advice on career

[richard Godfrei]

Hi guys,
Id like some honest opinion about my prospects in quantitative finance. My chances of admission and finding in QF related to energy or risk management. what kind of opportunities are available in QF with significant Operations research content

My profile:
I work as a risk analyst and planning engineer at an Offshore engineering firm. My job is to evaluate multi-disciplinary risks involved in undertaking any new construction project and also the come up with an optimised schedule for that project.

I have an undergraduate degree in civil engineering , pathetic GPA , but i had excellent scores in math in school and was a ranker in the national math olympiad.

Since my work involves scenario studies i liked working on monte carlo simulation and optimisation of schedule kinda things.. lot of it involves application of Operation research principles and programming in vba.

I always enjoyed maths ( Operations Research, probability and statistics, calculus/DE palatable, Linear algebra is ok, but totally love probability and stats... find it very philosophically endearing) and regret making the bone headed decision to get into civil engineering.

From reading your posts it seems you need a graduate degree to get into this field. I like to work in the energy industry or risk management function.

Just an added note i wonder if skills in language are useful i can speak arabic and french

Thanks a lot for your advice and support in advance

 

[DominiConnor]

I'm a headhunter for quants, and I have to say that you don't fit the standard pattern at all.

There is a path into the kind of finance that would value your skills, but I don't know enough about you to call it a better future than where you are currently headed.

I could see you as a quant/tactical developer in Excel VBA based upon what you can do already.

There aren't that many specialists who can do Excel well. By that I mean there are many excellent E/VBA people but most have them have "real jobs." Most Excel specialists are laughably incompetent, partly because outside the niche of front/mid office work the pay is really awful.

To make this work you need finance skills to get ahead of the herd. That means knowing DDE, VBA well, Bloomberg.
And yes you need to know what And() does. Yes, really, a large % of Excel specialists know absolutely no logic at all.
You should be able to debug spreadsheets written by others.
There's useful stuff like how to port from one version of Excel to another.

Killer Excel developers know how to build C++ XLLs, and are a rare breed. I teach this on the CQF, a course you should consider if you are serious about this line of work.

 

[richard Godfrei]

What other information would you like to know about me? I am surprised to know that there aren't many talented Excel Vba programmers in the industry.

when you say "There is a path into the kind of finance that would value your skills, but I don't know enough about you to call it a better future than where you are currently headed."?

Does it refer to the excel developer path or some other alternative path. Also if i do enter as an excel developer what would the career path if any?



Thanks for your advice, it was enlightening.