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Originally Posted by TheSpartanguy
Thanks for the reply even though it is more judgmental than helpful.
The "necessary homework" did not include an internship because we, the Ph.D. students, are "employed" by our department throughout the year, for conducting research and teaching. We do not get summer and winter off like the undergraduates. I viewed my Ph.D. as a full-time job. As for the network, I had a few sessions (organised by my university) with people from J. P. Morgan, Barclays etc. but perhaps you know dedicated networking courses, sessions etc. are not parts of the Ph.D. curricula, unlike the MBA folks. That said, I have networks via collaborations, joint publications etc. in the academia and research community, who unfortunately do not belong to the finance industry.
I do not want to sound boastful, but I believe my CV justifies my four years for a Ph.D. at least in terms of skills acquired and some research publications. So anyway, my question is still unanswered about applications to DBS etc. If you have any information regarding that, particularly whether they recruit freshers without internship (but with good knowledge of finance, mathematics and coding) I will be grateful.
And most Ph.D.s from my university or NUS etc. are exactly in a similar stage, without an internship because Ph.D. is a job. |
I don't doubt your PhD knowledge. I affirm that dedicating 4 years to learning a technical subject gives you more in depth knowledge which will be applicable to industry. I'm just a comp sci degree holder and where I'm based, it's understood that the PhDs create the models and the comp sci degree's implement them.
Specific to computer science, it's something like you devising an algorithm to improve run time from O(n^2) to O(n) and I implement it in C# because I sure as hell can't do what you did.
How did the networking with Barclays and JPM go? I'm sure they could use PhD knowledge to do exactly that, improve their run time algorithms.
Might be old knowledge. But two years ago, I heard RBS trying to shift their database to the new platform, kdb. And with hardware enhancing technologies like GPU and FPGA to be used in finance, I would think you're well positioned for these positions.