Please Review my Profile + How to compensate for poor grades

[Moideen]

Hi All,

TL;DR - Bad grades, decent GRE, varied but largely unrelated work experience. Want to become math based trader / financial coder but lack the background for MFM / MFE, how do I proceed?

I'm applying to financial mathematics programs starting in the fall of 2014. I realize it's very late to do anything about it now but I would really appreciate some advice on how to strengthen my profile, and whether it might be worth it to defer my plan to 2015 and spend proper time on doing so.

I majored in Information Technology at NITK Surathkal, India (class of 2010). My final year project was about using genetic algorithms to solve NP-hard portfolio optimization problems (transaction lot sizes were discrete, trading costs were considered.) Researching the applications of AI in finance while working on this project is what got me interested in the field. Recently, I've been reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Jack Schwager's Market Wizards and have decided that quantitative trading / strategy development is what I want to do.

overall CGPA: 6.79 / 10.00
Engineering Maths (including multi-variate calculus and differential equations): 6.5 / 10.0
Probability Theory with Statistics (but not stochastic calculus or anything): 6 / 10
Numerical Methods: 4 / 10 (don't ask)
Computer Science courses: all 7+ / 10

GRE: 165 quant (91%), 166 verbal (96%) [I got 800 and 590 respectively when I had written it in 2009]

Work experience: 1.5 years at Fidelity Investments doing software test automation for internal corporate technologies (as far removed from trading and proper coding as was possible, as luck would have it) and 1 year at a small telecom startup writing Java code for a voice / music recognition system (was exposed to but did not really work on the signal processing and hidden Markov model based code that made the magic happen). I currently work as a manager at my family agricultural business (we produce rubber, coffee and pepper) and I'm developing websites and apps on contract while I figure out my graduate school applications.

Any advice, insights and suggestions would be deeply appreciated.

Thanks a lot!

 

[systemtrader]

I'm kind of in the same shoe because of a poor profile. I'm just planning to do Certificates first and then see what happens. Maybe you should consider this too.

 

[Moideen]

I'm kind of in the same shoe because of a poor profile. I'm just planning to do Certificates first and then see what happens. Maybe you should consider this too.

Thanks systemtrader,

Have you found any good ones that don't cost thousands of dollars? I'm currently doing some online courses on Coursera related to math and finance, they're really enjoyable but sadly I don't think they count for much.

 

[systemtrader]

Thanks systemtrader,

Have you found any good ones that don't cost thousands of dollars? I'm currently doing some online courses on Coursera related to math and finance, they're really enjoyable but sadly I don't think they count for much.

The lowest priced Certificate I have found so far is the Computational Finance Certificate from University of Washington which costs around $11,000. Other Certificates range from $10,000 to 20,000. I don't think you can find something much lower than that as most certificates require over 10 credits and credit hours are usually over $1,000. Yup, Coursera is awesome, you can also check out some of these:

Universtiy of Toronto Mathematical Finance program:
http://www.utstat.utoronto.ca/sjaimung/index.html

and

MIT OpenCourseWare Sloan School of Management Courses:
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/

 

[PTN]

Thanks systemtrader,

Have you found any good ones that don't cost thousands of dollars? I'm currently doing some online courses on Coursera related to math and finance, they're really enjoyable but sadly I don't think they count for much.

Perhaps GRE Subject Test in Mathematics is more relevant than general gre test. Since you are from non maths major, you are seriously lacking many basic maths.

It would take you a full time of 9 months to prepare for GRE subject test in mathematics taking into consideration you had poor cgpa results.

To answer your question of wanting to become quant trader--- this role requires Msc Statistics/ Maths.
MFE is suitable for financial coder. Either career path you still need GRE subject test of good standing.