Options with PhD in Math

[JasonPaper]

Hi everybody,

I'm about to finish my PhD in Mathematics (fluid dynamics). For a long time I had been aiming at a career in academia but in the end I decided to leave and now, for the first time in my life, I'm looking for a job. My grades are fairly good but I have very little practical experience and my coding skills do not surpass the level of some coding basics courses during my Bachelors study; I have just started to learn Python on my own.

Anyway, so far I have applied to one quant trading job at SIG, I got a quick response, however, I got pretty much crushed in the online assessment. My main problem was the time pressure, the questions were probably not that hard but I didn't even get close to finishing 15 of them within 60 minutes. And I have the feeling this might be a bigger issue for me, I would claim that I have strong analytical skills, I'm good at understanding problems and I'm very precise, but I'm not quick. I'm used to take my time for solving problems, I would say my PhD was much more of a marathon than a sprint, if that makes any sense.

For this reasons I figured I should first brush up my skills on these typical online tests. However, I should also find a job in the near future. So my questions are the following: What do you think my chances are in general? Are there any jobs in this area that might be more suitable for someone with my skillset described above? And if all these companies offer 200k+ jobs, are there also companies looking for smart people but not necessarily geniuses for, let's say 100k+? Maybe this would be a good starting point for me, I'll be happy about any six figure salary for the start lol.


Thank you in advance!

 

[weab]

Apply to quantitative research roles instead of quant trading, would definitely suit you more.

 

[JasonPaper]

Apply to quantitative research roles instead of quant trading, would definitely suit you more.

Sounds reasonable, but from what I've read the research roles typically require very strong coding skills, is this true? For this reason I haven't tried so far.

 

[kombuchalover]

Sounds reasonable, but from what I've read the research roles typically require very strong coding skills, is this true? For this reason I haven't tried so far.

Depends on the firm/role, but I would generally say no it’s not true, especially if you go to a bank. Banks (in general) tend to be more rigorous in their approach besides. Also, if you are okay with ~100k and like to take your time and do rigorous math. I’d strongly recommend looking at insurance companies. It’s significantly less competitive and the models they use can be very interesting. Cyber insurance in particular is v complicated and interesting to price. But there’s all sorts of different options that are interesting in the insurance modeling space: catastrophe modeling, cyber, terrorism etc.

 

[alovya]

my PhD is also in fluid dynamics (well, shallow water equations from depth averaging Navier-Stokes equations), doing GPU computing applied to adaptive mesh refinement. what's your PhD specifically about?

 

[JasonPaper]

Depends on the firm/role, but I would generally say no it’s not true, especially if you go to a bank. Banks (in general) tend to be more rigorous in their approach besides. Also, if you are okay with ~100k and like to take your time and do rigorous math. I’d strongly recommend looking at insurance companies. It’s significantly less competitive and the models they use can be very interesting. Cyber insurance in particular is v complicated and interesting to price. But there’s all sorts of different options that are interesting in the insurance modeling space: catastrophe modeling, cyber, terrorism etc.

Thank you for the input. I would not say that I'm not competitive, I would like to get the best possible outcome for myself and, at least in the long run, I would definitely like to level up and make more than 100k. But for the moment I think I need to find the right mix between finding a good job and not taking too much time to find a job at all. I will have financial support from my university for a couple more months though. I will have a look at your suggestions, they sound interesting.

my PhD is also in fluid dynamics (well, shallow water equations from depth averaging Navier-Stokes equations), doing GPU computing applied to adaptive mesh refinement. what's your PhD specifically about?

Very interesting, I came in touch with the shallow water equations during my Bachelor's thesis when I was working with hyperbolic conservation laws. My PhD is mainly about a mix between fluid-structure interaction problems and magnetohydrodynamics. While I have taken a few classes on the numerical aspects, my own work is very much on the theoretical side, I prove the existence of weak solutions to some models from the area.

 

[Daniel Duffy]

As far as PDE is concerned, convection-diffusion is importat.
I would learn C++.

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