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Unhappy with my graduate school
Sygnon
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So
I am going to graduate school for an MSc in quantitative finance in Vienna.
I did my undergrad at UCSD in math.
I am applying for phds in math, entirely on my UCSD background.
The school I am currently at I am just beginning my second and last year at, and what was before what had become pretty dissatisfied with the program has now bloomed into very unhappy with the program.
Ultimately, I am not learning anything. the material is covered so lightly that they don't expect real understanding, just a lot of memorization of math that i previously was very excited about learning. The internship is not even that, its pretty much outsourcing a piece of code to me, ie i don't get any experience in the business just stay at home and write a program.
The program has been reduced to a few positives.
1) having something to put on my resume between my ba and phd that is european.
2) just finishing the fucking thing.
I was hoping if anyone could help me evaluate the positive side of finishing this thing. It leaves a total shit taste in my mouth to think about quitting, but I am to the point where I feel like I have learned so little that it might even be misleading to have this on my resume.
The advantages of stopping the program
1) I can attain a fluency mark in german at a nearby school (german tofel pretty much)
2) I can use this time to get ready for phds
3) I won't spend every day in vienna memorizing shit i am not expected to understand.
After talking to friends in various areas of business, they all said that experience weighs over degrees, and i will most likely have to rest the bulk of my skills from my phd. I had other ones say that degrees are everything and that a EU university might make me a lot more interesting even if it is horseshit.
Anyone feel like weighing in on this?
I am going to graduate school for an MSc in quantitative finance in Vienna.
I did my undergrad at UCSD in math.
I am applying for phds in math, entirely on my UCSD background.
The school I am currently at I am just beginning my second and last year at, and what was before what had become pretty dissatisfied with the program has now bloomed into very unhappy with the program.
Ultimately, I am not learning anything. the material is covered so lightly that they don't expect real understanding, just a lot of memorization of math that i previously was very excited about learning. The internship is not even that, its pretty much outsourcing a piece of code to me, ie i don't get any experience in the business just stay at home and write a program.
The program has been reduced to a few positives.
1) having something to put on my resume between my ba and phd that is european.
2) just finishing the fucking thing.
I was hoping if anyone could help me evaluate the positive side of finishing this thing. It leaves a total shit taste in my mouth to think about quitting, but I am to the point where I feel like I have learned so little that it might even be misleading to have this on my resume.
The advantages of stopping the program
1) I can attain a fluency mark in german at a nearby school (german tofel pretty much)
2) I can use this time to get ready for phds
3) I won't spend every day in vienna memorizing shit i am not expected to understand.
After talking to friends in various areas of business, they all said that experience weighs over degrees, and i will most likely have to rest the bulk of my skills from my phd. I had other ones say that degrees are everything and that a EU university might make me a lot more interesting even if it is horseshit.
Anyone feel like weighing in on this?
Sygnon on
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Posts
I think i should mention that I am in the first year of this program's existence, which would explain why classes are so disconnected / unrelated.
Ouch. I was in the first class of a brand new undergrad program when I got my degree. Some stuff went well but there were tons of screw-ups/passing the buck/staff and teachers generally not knowing WTF is going on. I've never been to grad school but I would bail and go somewhere else if you can afford it.
(I don't mean to sound harsh, but it's impossible to get a good feeling from a forum post)
What's stopping you from learning about these bits yourself? Pretty much any course a University teaches is just a framework and students should be looking to further their knowledge in the parts that interest them, or that they're struggling with.
If your placement is considerably worse than other peoples then I'd talk to both the company you're working with, explain that you are dissatisfied with what you have been given and see what they suggest. If they can't help you out then it's a case of seeing the course organiser and bringing up your complaints.
This is equal parts accurate and awesome.
this is a fair criticism, and I have been working on this. I already talked to the department head explaining how i felt that the treatment of the material was far too quick (for stochastics we were told to memorize a few proofs, know some names and move on)
The reply is that since we are not mathematicians nor economists we are expected to have a working understanding of both areas. This has degenerated into 3 hour long classes with lists of proofs we need to have memorized, and the solutions to famous problems we need to memorize.
With the volume of material, I cant spend the enormous amount of time necessary to foster a solid understanding. Ultimately, it is not demanded of me, so when it comes down to working for the grade, these things get pushed aside.
They want us to come in and be able to recite what we were told to memorize. Given a list of 200ish proofs / noteworthy solutions and you should be able to reproduce 8 within an hour.
As good a student as I like to imagine myself, going days out of the way for what is not required is not going to happen.
If you want to stick with academia, consider how it will look when you quit half way through your program.
As far as misleading to have on your resume, guess what the rest of the field does?
Talk to your internship and ask to have more time on site if possible. For God's sake don't say you're dissatisfied, that's a fast track to fired. Say you want more responsibility and you'd like to work alongside your team members. Come in on weekends. Generally, hunger and initiative are rewarded at internships as long as you don't try to actually change anything.
And yes, experience is more valuable than degrees except for in the quant world, where it's a tossup due to the importance of algo trading.
I wanted to get a phd in math somewhere in stochastics / probability, not with a focus on academia.
The job offers that were being generated by my program were rather pathetic. as far as the internship, it was pretty shady. I went to the office once, they gave me some papers to read and told me to come back with an R script that did this. Then I would be done.
Everything I was set up to do was asset pricing, bundles of bonds with strange notionals etc.
What positions would you be looking at, again most of the people I know did phds in math and are now in london, and their advice was to just go do a phd in math.
Also, sounds like your internship is totally gaming you or expecting you to be lazy. I also would never outsource asset pricing to an intern and then give him no ties to the company. Hell, that's how the secret sauce gets stolen in the first place, just ask Goldman.
I work at a mid-size trading firm, I can say that the PhD is probably overkill if you want to get into the trading industry (not sure about big investment banks however). As everything is now electronic and there is a huge focus on latency and speed, you would do well to get some programming experience to round out your education. I write software full time and thus have a BS/MS in computer science, but even the traders we hire have some programming experience.
edit: I'm not sure if your programming experience is limited to R/MatLab, but picking up some C++, C#, or Java definitely wouldn't hurt.
This is a common experience with European schools on the continent. They are not known for their academic rigor, rather the lackadaisical attitude they approach research. While the research they produce is legitimate (unlike what comes out of Chinese universities), it is not, for the most part, significant. Post-secondary European education is, for the most part, not serious.
The comparison with an American school, like UCSD, which I am familiar, must strike you as a rather noticeable step backward.
From my experience, it is not the academics of your European sojourn that will interest potential employers, but your work experience. Working in Europe is somewhat exotic. Going to school there is not. Go to a PhD program, either in the UK, Canada, or the States. The closer you are to New York, SF or London, the better.
I'm in NYC in the HF sector, so I'm not a market maker, so I'm a glorified button pusher/accountant. I have heard Chicago is more meritocratic and NYC is more stuffy, so that doesn't surprise me. I think some of the modelers, programmers and risk guys at the large banks have PhD requirements. It's just not a very common thing.
This is one area I am definitely not hurting, i have 8 years experience writing C# code, all of it with a huge focus on optimization, as well as having a lot of math on the computational side.
I was looking at a lot of job postings, and it seems that while a phd may be overkill, it does not close many doors. Is this incorrect?
Mithrandir
God, you are so right. The primary frustration is that I don't feel I am mastering, well, anything, and I have a phd coming up.
I did forget to mention that between this program and the phd would be about 2 weeks, and I hate to sound like a sissy but burnout is becoming a pretty big factor. Especially if I want to do well on initial placement exams.
Krista -
I have become pretty jaded on this subject - I find that in grad school, since students are tracked so closely, that they suggest what stat they want to boost. If they want to boost job placement %, they are going to push for everyone to go out and get jobs, if they want to talk about how amazing the phd programs their students go to, they push phds.
And I'm laughing at the part about grad school tracking students closely. I know it differs widely between subject areas but my most intense frustration with my grad school experience has been in the completely lack of direction. I keep being told to find a way to do what is best for myself and my career without being given much support/guidance to figure out what that entails.
well, for biz related crap, the financial times ranking is all important. they track if you continue school, where
and if you get a job, how much you make.
Needless to say, new program and they are foaming at the mouth to make sure the FT ranking is good.
But yeah, I get emails on about a daily basis with opportunities to take classes or teach classes or learn a new lab technique or mentor some high school students or get involved in policy or write book chapters or collaborate with people in Iran without really any advice on how doing each of things helps/hinders a given career.