How to get a graduate quant job with poor grades: 11-hour night shifts
In finance, where you study can sometimes be more important than your final grade, but having substandard marks will always hurt your chances. This is especially true in a quantitative field like quant trading. And yet, some quants are making it work in spite of their academic underperformance.
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A viral post from a QuantNet user last week described how he was able to get into an MFE course (a specialized masters course for quantitative finance jobs) at Columbia with just a 2.98 CGPA. The catch: it took four years of work experience and 11-hour night shifts to get there.
The user, who previously had internship experience as a data scientist, says he was able to join a top London investment bank via referral in a business analytics role working a night shift from 6pm to 5am. A current opening in business analytics at Goldman Sachs describes what he might have been doing: developing analytical reports and dashboards and "drawing commercially actionable insights from large datasets, for senior leaders helping them grow our business with clients."
After multiple years in the role, he then transitioned into exotics structuring. This was the key. He says that internal mobility is "an effective route to quant roles" and that the experience he gained there was worth "way more than that CGPA from the days of yore."
The candidate also did extensive work outside his job to get into the course. He undertook multiple finance and machine learning projects, frequently updating his GitHub. He also took three different pre-MFE courses, studying at night (he was doing day shifts by now), and obtained distinctions in two of them.
In addition to the Columbia course, the candidate was accepted into three other MFEs from NYU Tandon, NC State and NTU in Singapore. He was rejected from just one school, the University of Chicago.
It's not impossible to get into a top MFE with bad grades, but it's certainly the long-route in. Another quant recently shared that they had accepted an offer and $10k scholarship to Princeton's Master in Finance with a UGPA of 3.88 and comparatively much less experience.
The candidate had offers for nine other MFE courses, including from Columbia and the University of Chicago, the latter of which offered him a scholarship of close to $40k. He did receive one rejection, too: from Stanford's mathematical and computational finance course.
The higher GPA candidate, like the lower one, had a data science internship at a major financial services company. He also was a TA for econometrics courses at his university and a school sports captain, competing at a national level.
The high-GPA candidate said he picked Princeton as it was the top school for a number of characteristics, including trading placements and options/derivatives coursework. Graduates of the Princeton course are thought to earn a starting compensation of over $250k, more than any other MFE. It accepts just 4.3% of applicants.
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