What will Fed do ?

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid452319854/bctid1273082236

The fight against subprime – superconduit

Wachovia strategist discusses newly proposed conduit

Fake a truth

Market Manipulation by Hedge Funds

Career fair

The time has come to go out and compete with all the budding financial engineers out there. I didn’ realize it would be so soon. It has just been 3 months into the course and you are out applying for full time positions. Have started receiving interview shortlist and invitation to networking events. I heard recruiting here is very different from the campus recruiting we have in India. I remember back in Pilani we used to have companies interviewing you for half a day and next morning you would know the decision. It works differently here in the sense that the process is a little lengthy. I will talk about the process once I go through an entire run. However, I do want to write about the career fair I attended today.

So this was organized by the Centre for Career Education at Columbia University. We had around 140 companies and 2-3 representatives from each company. The purpose of this event is to get to know more about the firms and another chance to pass on your resume. Some people believe that it is the time you get to impress the employers so that you have a better chance of getting an interview call. Others make it a point to collect lots of business cards.

What did I do today ? Well, I did a bit of everything mentioned above. What came in really handy was the 2 hours put in the  previous night to choose 25 companies from that list of 140. My friend and I just sat down for an hour and divided them into different categories. There were the biggies, about which we already knew and just wanted to drop in our resumes. These are the firms which will be most crowded and you have to really get into a queue to talk to the representatives. There were then the sort of middies about whom you have heard a little but would want to know more. These were then googled and were searched to find if they had any roles matching our skill set. Lastly were these shorties about whom you would have never heard and even their websites seem to be on the cryptic side . We decided to spend some time with these shorties on the career fair and managed to get a lot of relevant information from them.

All in all a good experience. I don’t know whether the resumes submitted would be of any use because most of them pointed us to their websites. Some one also mentioned that the resume pile might end up in a shredder after the fair.

Recommended reading

Before taking a plunge into finance I read some books to give me a flavor of the Street. I would recommend the following for people who are on a similar path. Do remember that some of these books were written around 10 years back and things have changed a lot.

When Genius Failed

Liar’s Poker

Barbarians at the gate

Fooled by randomness

Den of thieves

My life as a quant

Fiasco

Against the God

Capital Ideas

Busy busy….

Imagine someone asking you to finish a task and saying that he wants it yesterday. No that is not a typo, I did mean yesterday. I was told by a professor to work on a project which has to be finished asap. Now that means whatever time that is left after attending the classes, corporate presentations, networking events, finishing the assignments has to go into this project. So the past couple of days have been really crazy. Even now when I am typing this post, I am thinking about an assignment problem which is due day after tomorrow.

I guess it is this kind of a lifestyle which teaches you to best utilize time and efficiently accomplish multi-tasking. Add to that the collaborative effort. For example some of us divide the corporate presentations between us and finally end up getting information from all of them. It is a pity that same cannot be applied to assignments

What are my chances ?

My friends and I have been receiving e-mails from prospective FE students to estimate their chances. My standard answer to all of them is that I really can’t do it. And what is the point in me doing it, even if I say that you have good/bad chances how will that affect your application ? The applicants must try to understand that it is the Admission Committee who takes a call on your application and no one really knows what is on their mind.

According to me the right approach to this is to look at your profile and see how you can improve it. Believe me when I say that there are hardly any perfect application. Every applicant has some unique qualities which have the potential of impressing the Admission Committee. You will also see something missing in your profile, now that could be poor grades, low GRE score, no relevant work experience, lesser known companies/colleges etc. Instead of continuously cribbing about that black spot, think about how you can compensate for that. If you see no way in which you can improve upon that then just forget it and concentrate on selling yourself on your plus points.

Let me just list down some things which might help in improving your profile :-

Low GRE Quant Score – I will not get into how low is “low” but if you think you could do better, then re-take the GRE.

Poor Grades – Well, this is tricky. Although I believe that grades are not the best indicators of a person’s hold over a subject but they go a long way in giving an idea about his sincerity to the course curriculum. One way to compensate for poor grades is to get a good score in Math Subject GRE.

No relevant work experience – Ok, so you are this software/electrical engineer who has decided to pursue Financial Engineering. Now if you have planned to pursue this course you better have some exposure to the financial world. Make up for no relevant experience by taking some Finance certification courses. If you are still studying then take up some projects in the math/finance departments. Do some part-time internships. Be a part of XYZ-finance clubs/society.

These are some guidelines based on what I think. There will be people who will tell you that such and such certification is useless. But I believe in the saying that something is better than nothing. So lookout for opportunities which in some way or the other add on to your profile and makes it impressive.

Vacation time…

After a tough 1 week I feel life has come to a hault. Just finished with the first summer term at Columbia. I am officially on vacation now. Couple of friends coming over to NY, hoping to have a good time

Statement of Purpose

I have recently received some e-mails asking for a copy of my SOP. I refused to pass that around for two main reasons. Firstly, I believe it is something very personal to me and would not like to distribute it around. I am quite sure that SOPs get passed around pretty often and within no time you might end up reading your own statement on one of these websites. The second and the more important reason is that concerning the human nature. Most of us prefer the easy way out of picking up chunks from someone else’s essay. When you have it lying in front of you, it is a very natural tendency to think around those lines and somehow the sentences and the words written by the person seem very apt. This results in restricting your thoughts around the 2-3 SOPs you would have read. Eventually this will result in you being a copy and not an original.

I spent around a month compiling my statement. I needed to introspect on a lot of things and decide on how I wanted to market myself. The admission committee would want to look at some hard facts. Merely saying that I read books on finance or I am interested in Derivatives is not enough. Tell them what you have read and learnt, tell them that you took some tests and scored well. Tell them how this degree is a logical extension of what you are doing today and how it fits in to your future plans. Tailor your SOP to cater to different schools. Have a look at their course curriculum explain to them why such a combination is best for you.

Finally, get your SOP reviewed before sending it out. The reason I say this is because by the time you would be done with your third draft you would be able to recite it backwards. Some very glaring mistakes will get ignored because you have been reading this piece almost everyday and so you don’t read it word by word now. I though my sentence constructions are not very good so I had asked my High School English teacher to review it for me. This review was to see that the language in the essay was correct. The second review was done by a current Financial Engineering student. This helped me cut down on things which were not relevant and included aspects which were crucial to the admission.

So coming to the conclusion, spend some time listing down what you might want to include in the SOP, prepare a rough draft, keep adding/deleting stuff, use powerful verbs, cite examples, ask your friends in between to give you some comments, get it reviewed, send it.

Weather Derivatives

The derivatives on basic financial instruments are not really a surprise. But yesterday when I finished watching a  documentary on Enron, I got to know that one could even hedge by buying weather derivatives. It has the same basic principle that the value depends on the underlying instrument, which in this case is the weather. For example an air-conditioning company might want to get into one of these contracts to compensate for the summers being not all that hot.

To read more, see this