Question about doctorate degrees for someone possibly interested in working in the quant field.

[Totally]

Hello everyone, I am a long time lurker around the forums and I never really found a thread that addresses this question specifically. I found numerous mfe vs phd threads which is not what this is. I am very 'possibly' interested in working for a hedge fund or financial institution as some sort of a quantitative person down the road, it seems like quite a fascinating career for someone with a PhD in a scientific field.

Anyways before I ask my question, let me introduce myself. I am a rising undergraduate senior this fall at UC Berkeley majoring in Engineering Physics and minoring in Nuclear Engineering. All of my classes are heavily math based - even some PDE experience from neutron transport and other nuclear engineering topics, etc. I have worked real science internships both last summer and this summer. I have programming experience in C from my part time job over the last year working at Berkeley National Lab, and much Matlab experience as I have been using it for 3 years + and every day this summer for 8 hours a day heavily. I love physics enough to pursue a doctorate in it, and thus here is my dilemma...

My question is, if I wanted to pursue a hedge fund job upon graduation with a PhD, are certain PhD candidates valued more than others? For example, would a candidate holding an astrophysics PhD be more sought after than a physics PhD or a math PhD or cs doctorate?

I would love to hear from people that are in my shoes right now with a decision like this, as well as people that have been through this already or people in industry.

If all the PhD's are equal - My follow up question would be: Does where you get the PhD matter more than what it is in? (Assuming it is quantitative) I am looking at applying to MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech, Princeton, etc in the fall.

 

[Barny]

Where you get your PhD matters a great deal. The schools you listed are fine.

As for areas that matter more - 99% of recruiters will not have the first idea what your PhD involved, so it doesn't really matter. The important thing for you to do is to embellish the truth and claim that you wrote thousands of lines of code and worked with data. This tactic comes unstuck when your interviewer did the same PhD as you, of course. So it doesn't really matter too much what you do it in. If you do get a chance to write code and crunch data, then this is definitely better than doing an experimental PhD where you spend your 3 years tightening screws and doing other general monkey work.

Recruiters, being clueless, also slavishly search for buzzwords. If you worked at CERN, they love that, because it's on their buzz-word list. If you analysed huge data sets, they love that, because it's on their buzz-word list. If you developed stochastic differential equations, they love that, because it's on their buzz-word list.

Fooling a recruiter is not difficult. So just do a PhD that you are interested in and do it at the most reputable university you can possibly manage. Of course, this maximises one set of your contraints but minimises another. The single most important thing about doing a PhD is getting a good supervisor. If you are shamelessly optimising for finance you are unlikely to be so fortunate, in which case getting to the end of your 3-5 years will be an enormous struggle anyway and you won't even get your coveted PhD which you think will open so many doors for you.

 

[Totally]

Barny, thank you very much. That was useful. Sounds like I am going to shoot for the schools I listed and maybe a few more and see what happens. Really dumb question - Are theoretical PhD's done from the university campus whereas experimental done at the big National Labs? Or do they mix alot. And another dumb question - is the supervisor something I worry about once I've delved into the program, or before I apply?

Once again, thank you for the response!

 

[kwlmy]

The universities that you are considering do both theoretical and experimental work. Apply to schools or choose your potential advisors based on the research area you would like to be in. You need to be a little flexible here because the nature of the research projects/topics depends a lot on the availability of funding at the time. In the first one or two years, you'll be focusing on courses, studying and passing your qualifying exam. In most schools, you don't decide on who you want to work with until the end of first year or after you pass your qualifying exam. After that you have to do some research and prepare for your candidacy exam. Until then, don't worry about finance - you'll be busy.

 

[Barny]

Barny, thank you very much. That was useful. Sounds like I am going to shoot for the schools I listed and maybe a few more and see what happens. Really dumb question - Are theoretical PhD's done from the university campus whereas experimental done at the big National Labs? Or do they mix alot. And another dumb question - is the supervisor something I worry about once I've delved into the program, or before I apply?

Once again, thank you for the response!

Experimental physics is not just done at national labs. It sounds like you have about another 50 hours of your own research to do before you should be asking others questions.