Programmer to a Financial Engineer

It has been alomost a year long process. I started preparing for the GRE in July 2006 and got my VISA on 2nd May 2007. I would be heading to Columbia University, New York to pursue a Master’s degree in Financial Engineering.

I like programming and have been doing that for the past 2 years, first at Yahoo, Bangalore and then at Morgan Stanley, Mumbai. The interest in Finance arose because of my inability to read The Economic Times. It was further increased by the TV sets at Morgan which continuously play CNBC TV18. Now imagine having lunch with your colleagues who are staring at the screen and the topic of discussion being the SENSEX. They might as well have talked about simple things like stocks or bonds and it would still have been Greek to me. The things didn’t end there, as part of the training program we were supposed to finish studying some online financial modules. The problem with these modules was that you were supposed to take a test after finishing each of them. If you scored less than 60% you would have to redo that particular module.

So as the alchemist would put it, the forces in nature were conspiring to teach finance to this poor programmer. Marta kya na karta.. he plunged into the financial world and found something else instead of learning design patterns or making his code generic. After that the programmer in him took a backseat. It was like learning some new language and the kick you get when you can understand a sentence written in that foreign language.

Things have come a long way since then. Here I am, starting a blog today so that I can document how things progress with my graduate studies. Hopefully this blog will serve to give a good idea to newbies applying for further studies in the field of Quantitative Finance as well as let my friends and relatives know what I am upto.

 

~ by financialengineer on May 11, 2007.