lol now why didn't you bother to paste this in the forum like I requested? I can tell you why. Universities do not respond to inquiries like yours with responses like the one you supposedly received. In fact, it's quite laughable. They do not say, paraphrasing, "what kind of an idiotic piece of information are you getting? I mean, five year teaching commitments would like, totally suck or something." Apparently the person responding from the top finance program in the entire country was not even able to afford you the courtesy of a signature! Yea. You see John the random faculty member was meandering the halls when suddenly he decided aw what the hell let's see what's in the official email box. pff! shyea right. Plus, let's consider some of your English: "A copy of their reply has PM to you. Now if you still think that the E-mail reply is fake. Go to cross reference directly with..." It very broken. No can make sense of sentence! Any official reply from Wharton would probably contain vocabulary and formal structure well beyond your wherewithal. Nice try chop sticks, but for a quant or an aspiring quant, you're not too calculating. I'm calling Wharton back on Monday to confirm the truth of the matter.---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------Subject: RE: Re Admission CriteriaFrom: "Wharton Doctoral Programs" <doctoral-admissions@wharton.upenn.edu>Date: Wed, 19 April, 2006 3:31 pmTo: --------------------------------------------------------------------------What? I don't know where you got your information but we will notconfirm any statement like that. It's ludicrous.-----Original Message-----From: Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2006 6:10 AMTo: Wharton Doctoral ProgramsSubject: Re Admission CriteriaDear Sir/Madam,I was informed that students need to sign an contact / agreement toassume only teaching and research position for 5 years after graduation inorder to graduate from your PhD in finance program.Please confirm if it is the case.RegardsQuoteOriginally posted by: ace2002QuoteOriginally posted by: flankyes. paste it here plz, not because I don't believe you per se but because I want to cross-reference.Enough bluffing! A copy of their reply has PM to you. Now if you still think that the E-mail reply is fake. Go to cross reference directly with Wharton *again*. I will leave you here.

QuoteOriginally posted by: ace2002]You still don't understand. What marvin try to tell you is that there are quite a number of good PhDs with highly quatitative skills than you will choose quant finance rather than acdemia as career, as oppose to what you have been saying. The consequence of that is: you will face fierce competition in the QF job market and your school name is going to hurt. Just to clarify a bit, there is a big difference between "hurt" as in you'll have to work a somewhat harder, and "hurt" as in the odds are so much against you that you should give up. School name is definitely in the former category.One annoyance that I had in job hunting was the lack of specific detail. For example quants work "long hours," have "lots of stress," "make lots of money," and jobs are "difficult to get." Those are statements are so general as to be useless. When I finally got the detailed information, the answers weren't so bad. Getting a job in QF is *trivially easy* compared to getting a tenured physics faculty position, and the hours are long and the stress is high, but they aren't anywhere near what an emergency room intern faces. Also, the money while still good isn't quite that good when you look into the details.In the case of the specific question, I think the consensus here is yes, not getting a degree from the Ivy's is a mild handicap, but it isn't a fatal one, and there are specific ways of working around it (networking, publications, internships, and avoiding HR whenever possible.)

QuoteOriginally posted by: flankI remain unconvinced about the supposed existence of a ph.d tsunami flooding the market. Americans just don't get ph.ds. I'm not speculating here -- numerous heads of economics & finance departments from many many universities I've contacted report that only the foreigners are taking ph.ds.But that is fact is almost totally irrelevant. Employers do not care what citizenship you have, and the only way this enters in the equation at all is that processing a work visa is an adminstrative hassle (and for a major IB it's a minor one). A pretty large fraction of overseas Ph.D.'s (I'm guessing more than half) stay in the United States. One of the benefits of working in a large multinational corporation is that you get to meet interesting people from all over the world, and there is something uplifting about the philosophy that exists in this sort of capitalism (i.e. we don't care what you look like or where you came from, all we care about is how much money you can make for us.)QuoteAmerican businesses for whatever reason are looking for U.S. citizens.First of all, it is illegal for a US company to discriminate on the basis of work status. Legally, a US company cannot prefer a US citizen over a permanent resident or someone with a valid work visa. Second, there is no reason why a rational profit-maximizing company would want a citizen over a permanent resident, and the only place where this is even an issue is government work or the defense industry.QuoteA large part of the reason is probably the fact that obtaining worker visas is difficult for foreign students so even if they do get hired there's no guarantee that a) they'll stay put and b) they'll even be permitted to work.People that a driven enough to get to the United States in order to get a Ph.D. are generally also driven enough to get permanent residency and citizenship. If you have skills, it's not a terribly difficult process.Second, the hassle of getting a work visa is a major issue for a smaller company. Larger companies have dedicated staff that handle these sorts of issues, and for a big I-Bank (or other MNC), getting a work visa for a skilled worker that they want to hire is at best a minor annoyance.QuoteThe point here is that the Ph.ds are not aiming for industry; they're aiming to pump out theoretical publications that are great for academia but are useless for industry.The job situation in academia is so bad that most Ph.D.'s end up in industry whether that was their original career goal or not. QuoteNobody's gonna give two shakes about epsilon neighborhoods and some esoteric econometrics theory.You'd be surprised what people care about.QuoteHere's my other point: all of these opinions being offered to me are in the context of obtaining a quant job immediately after graduating, but why is this a necessity? Why can't I just go work someplace else for awhile such as but not limited to actuarial science, and then apply to quant jobs? Suppose I work for a year as an actuary earning a healthy income, and then apply to a quant job. Suppose further that my competition is someone who graduated from northwestern who has zero work experience. Do you suppose that they will favor that person based on university name recognition alone? No one has ever addressed this kind of scenario despite the fact that I've conjectured it repeatedly.My sense is that work experience is very important, but it has to be the right type of work experience. If your goal is to get a quant job, I suspect that working as a C++ programmer would be much more useful than being an actuary. At that point, you have to ask yourself what you want, why do you want to be a quant? why do you want to be an actuary? what are the tradeoffs that you want to make?The other thing (and this is personal experience), one you get settled in a job, it becomes increasingly difficult to leave. A year ago, it would have been much easier for me to leave my current job, but I've made friends am doing reasonable work, the conditions are good. It's get harder and harder to think about leaving. Again, whether this is good or bad, depends on what you want to do.QuoteOn a similar topic, internships need not be banking internships. There are internships working in airline industries, c++ programming, actuarial science, the federal reserve, the medical industry, etc. etc., so joe blow from northwestern (with nothing but a narrowly focused piece of research) and I can walk up to a banking employer. He can say, "uh, yeah. I learned about this great new macroeconomics theory..." and I can say, "I have experience coordinating with a team working at an airline company and then I passed the first two actuarial exams and worked in life insurance gaining all kinds of knowledge translatable to quant finance and my dissertation is a synthesis of finance and econometrics specifically designed for quant and I have courses in Excel, VB, a minor in computer science, and a TA position writing statistical software in c++ and matlab. By the way, I can speak English."OK. Not having a low-tier degree is not fatal, but what you just said is going to kill your chances of getting a job at any multi-national corporation.1) You must always have respect for the skills of the people you are competing against. Keep in mind that someone who is a competitor for a job at one point is a co-worker or supervisor at another, and so putting down the credentials of someone else is dangerous because the person who is interviewing you might have the same background.2) Major corporations are globalized to a degree that most people don't realize, this is particularly the case in finance. If you interview for a major bank, it is extremely likely that you will have at least one person on the interview panel who is a non-native speaker of English (and in one of my interviews at a major bank, I think that 80% of the people who interviewed me were non-native English speakers). If you bring up ability to speak English fluently or being American at an interview you are likely to kill your chance of getting a job as a quant (or any other job), and you are going to run into *huge* career issues since there is a good chance that your boss or his boss is going to be a non-native English speaking foreigner.As you mention most Ph.D. students are foreigners, if you have a company or division that hires mostly Ph.D.'s then..... You really need to think about this, because one of the goals of the interview is to get you to blurt out stuff like that.

1) Who said I was referring to permanent work residents or those with work visas? Nobody in my department that I know of is a permanent resident, and work visas are reportedly issued by occupation rather than like a fishing license. E.g., if there's a large demand for programmers, then the foreign programmer needs to obtain a visa specifically for programming, and the number available depends on demand for that skill at the time. My fellow classmates from India & China are the ones who relayed this to me. However, there must also be other reasons in professions other than quant. For example, if a foreigner has difficulty speaking English, then there are going to be some real practical problems on the jobsite. One friend of mine, Akira, is a student in aviation. Some time ago, he accidentally flew into some restricted airspace because his English was so bad that he misunderstood the directives he was given. He nearly lost his flying permit. I know, you're thinking that could have been a hundred things, but trust me. Nine times out of ten he can't compose a simple sentence without making some really egregious spelling or grammatical errors. I know because I was helping him with some of his English papers as an undergrad.2) The job situation may be bad in academia, but that doesn't change the fact that doctoral students seem to be conditioned to prepare for academia nevertheless. Around here, the vast majority are doing whatever they can to prepare for an academic career, and that's the point I made earlier: they're preparing for teaching and winding up elsewhere insofar as the difficulty of getting a professorship is true. Hence, I've postulated that diversifying my skill set supplements a measure of advantage.3) About epsilon neighborhoods. Quant is a strange bird. You know what I need are some books that describe quantitative finance, what the various aspects of it are, the structure of the industry, and so on. Are there any good materials out there that explicate all the above?4) I was told by some actuaries on a different forum that actuaries are frequently recruited from ibanks for quant positions. At any rate, I don't have alot of computer science classes so getting a dedicated computer science job would be difficult and a waste of time.5) In an interview, I'm obviously not going to be so flippant and informal. For example, my fluent knowledge of English will speak for itself without pointing out, "hey did you happen to notice I have great communication skills? Yea! I'm kick arse!" C'mon. Likewise, I'm not going to draw any contrasts between my own education and that of others, but rather, I'll just highlight my diverse education and work experience and let any contrasts remain implicit.At any rate, what am I still doing here? I respect your level headed opinions fish and various others but still some are spurious such as ace's lame attempt at forging a Wharton reply lol. 'Serves me right for trying to decipher anonymous reports on an Internet forum instead of contacting known authorities on the subject. Still, it gave me a good start.QuoteOriginally posted by: twofishQuoteOriginally posted by: flankI remain unconvinced about the supposed existence of a ph.d tsunami flooding the market. Americans just don't get ph.ds. I'm not speculating here -- numerous heads of economics & finance departments from many many universities I've contacted report that only the foreigners are taking ph.ds.But that is fact is almost totally irrelevant. Employers do not care what citizenship you have, and the only way this enters in the equation at all is that processing a work visa is an adminstrative hassle (and for a major IB it's a minor one). A pretty large fraction of overseas Ph.D.'s (I'm guessing more than half) stay in the United States. One of the benefits of working in a large multinational corporation is that you get to meet interesting people from all over the world, and there is something uplifting about the philosophy that exists in this sort of capitalism (i.e. we don't care what you look like or where you came from, all we care about is how much money you can make for us.)QuoteAmerican businesses for whatever reason are looking for U.S. citizens.First of all, it is illegal for a US company to discriminate on the basis of work status. Legally, a US company cannot prefer a US citizen over a permanent resident or someone with a valid work visa. Second, there is no reason why a rational profit-maximizing company would want a citizen over a permanent resident, and the only place where this is even an issue is government work or the defense industry.QuoteA large part of the reason is probably the fact that obtaining worker visas is difficult for foreign students so even if they do get hired there's no guarantee that a) they'll stay put and b) they'll even be permitted to work.People that a driven enough to get to the United States in order to get a Ph.D. are generally also driven enough to get permanent residency and citizenship. If you have skills, it's not a terribly difficult process.Second, the hassle of getting a work visa is a major issue for a smaller company. Larger companies have dedicated staff that handle these sorts of issues, and for a big I-Bank (or other MNC), getting a work visa for a skilled worker that they want to hire is at best a minor annoyance.QuoteThe point here is that the Ph.ds are not aiming for industry; they're aiming to pump out theoretical publications that are great for academia but are useless for industry.The job situation in academia is so bad that most Ph.D.'s end up in industry whether that was their original career goal or not. QuoteNobody's gonna give two shakes about epsilon neighborhoods and some esoteric econometrics theory.You'd be surprised what people care about.QuoteHere's my other point: all of these opinions being offered to me are in the context of obtaining a quant job immediately after graduating, but why is this a necessity? Why can't I just go work someplace else for awhile such as but not limited to actuarial science, and then apply to quant jobs? Suppose I work for a year as an actuary earning a healthy income, and then apply to a quant job. Suppose further that my competition is someone who graduated from northwestern who has zero work experience. Do you suppose that they will favor that person based on university name recognition alone? No one has ever addressed this kind of scenario despite the fact that I've conjectured it repeatedly.My sense is that work experience is very important, but it has to be the right type of work experience. If your goal is to get a quant job, I suspect that working as a C++ programmer would be much more useful than being an actuary. At that point, you have to ask yourself what you want, why do you want to be a quant? why do you want to be an actuary? what are the tradeoffs that you want to make?The other thing (and this is personal experience), one you get settled in a job, it becomes increasingly difficult to leave. A year ago, it would have been much easier for me to leave my current job, but I've made friends am doing reasonable work, the conditions are good. It's get harder and harder to think about leaving. Again, whether this is good or bad, depends on what you want to do.QuoteOn a similar topic, internships need not be banking internships. There are internships working in airline industries, c++ programming, actuarial science, the federal reserve, the medical industry, etc. etc., so joe blow from northwestern (with nothing but a narrowly focused piece of research) and I can walk up to a banking employer. He can say, "uh, yeah. I learned about this great new macroeconomics theory..." and I can say, "I have experience coordinating with a team working at an airline company and then I passed the first two actuarial exams and worked in life insurance gaining all kinds of knowledge translatable to quant finance and my dissertation is a synthesis of finance and econometrics specifically designed for quant and I have courses in Excel, VB, a minor in computer science, and a TA position writing statistical software in c++ and matlab. By the way, I can speak English."OK. Not having a low-tier degree is not fatal, but what you just said is going to kill your chances of getting a job at any multi-national corporation.1) You must always have respect for the skills of the people you are competing against. Keep in mind that someone who is a competitor for a job at one point is a co-worker or supervisor at another, and so putting down the credentials of someone else is dangerous because the person who is interviewing you might have the same background.2) Major corporations are globalized to a degree that most people don't realize, this is particularly the case in finance. If you interview for a major bank, it is extremely likely that you will have at least one person on the interview panel who is a non-native speaker of English (and in one of my interviews at a major bank, I think that 80% of the people who interviewed me were non-native English speakers). If you bring up ability to speak English fluently or being American at an interview you are likely to kill your chance of getting a job as a quant (or any other job), and you are going to run into *huge* career issues since there is a good chance that your boss or his boss is going to be a non-native English speaking foreigner.As you mention most Ph.D. students are foreigners, if you have a company or division that hires mostly Ph.D.'s then..... You really need to think about this, because one of the goals of the interview is to get you to blurt out stuff like that.

Quote In an interview, I'm obviously not going to be so flippant and informal. For example, my fluent knowledge of English will speak for itself without pointing out, "hey did you happen to notice I have great communication skills? Yea! I'm kick arse!" C'mon. Likewise, I'm not going to draw any contrasts between my own education and that of others, but rather, I'll just highlight my diverse education and work experience and let any contrasts remain implicit.At any rate, what am I still doing here? I respect your level headed opinions fish and various others but still some are spurious such as ace's lame attempt at forging a Wharton reply lol. 'Serves me right for trying to decipher anonymous reports on an Internet forum instead of contacting known authorities on the subject. Still, it gave me a good start. Is this guy for real? Unbelievable!And this thread is almost 100 posts strong !?

Unfortunately, most firms do have a bias towards Ivys. I have a degree from one of them and many of the people we interview are also from such programs. For experienced hires, we don't really care. For entry level positions (we literally receive hundreds of resumes for one opening), what are the alternatives? Unless you truly stand out among people who have almost exactly the same backgroud as you do but from a better university. It's not a policy because it's against the law and the firm can be sued. I don't believe Wharton has such a 5-year agreement, unless it lends money to students, like law school waiving tuition for students who pursue a public defendant career. Even then, the students can pay back the money and do whatever. Also, as I responded on the other board, econ Ph.Ds face very stiff challenges in getting an offer, the required skillsets are too different for most quant jobs.

QuoteOriginally posted by: nonParametricUnfortunately, most firms do have a bias towards Ivys. I have a degree from one of them and many of the people we interview are also from such programs. For experienced hires, we don't really care.I should point out that the entry-level Ph.D. quant jobs (or at least the ones I've been steered to) have been through the "experienced hire" channel which goes through a headhunter to a hiring manager and completely bypasses human resources. This means I'm likely seeing a whole different set of people and attitudes than the ones that other people in the thread are seeing.I've rarely had to deal with HR, and in the rare instance I've had to deal with HR, my experiences have been painful and unpleasant. One reason for this is that the HH sees you and sees $$$$, whereas when HR sees you, you are just another warm body that goes through the process they've set up.

QuoteOriginally posted by: flank1) Who said I was referring to permanent work residents or those with work visas? Nobody in my department that I know of is a permanent resident, and work visas are reportedly issued by occupation rather than like a fishing license.Something got seriously garbled here. That's not how the visa system works. If an employer wants someone then then can file a petition for an immigration visa or a temporary worker visa. Many smaller companies won't do sponsorship, but for a multi-national corporation, its not a huge deal. There are quota limits, but a Ph.d. hired by an investment bank is pretty close to the head of the line.QuoteHowever, there must also be other reasons in professions other than quant. For example, if a foreigner has difficulty speaking English, then there are going to be some real practical problems on the jobsite.This is much less of a handicap in technical professions since most of the communications is in math and programming jargon. Also, it is much easier teach someone with excellent math skills a working knowledge of English than it is to teach someone with excellent English, working math skills. One other thing is that a lot of the communications takes place in written form like e-mail, and it is much easier to learn written communication than spoken.The other thing to keep in mind is that multi-national corporations are global entities, and are used to working in multi-lingual environments. QuoteNine times out of ten he can't compose a simple sentence without making some really egregious spelling or grammatical errors. I know because I was helping him with some of his English papers as an undergrad.And for a quant job, no one is going to care how good or bad his spelling and grammar are, if he is a whiz at math puzzles and can code excellent C++. Quote4) I was told by some actuaries on a different forum that actuaries are frequently recruited from ibanks for quant positions. At any rate, I don't have alot of computer science classes so getting a dedicated computer science job would be difficult and a waste of time.Problem here... A quant is a dedicated computer science job. Again, this may be a function of the jobs that my head hunters have steered me toward, but the level of programming and math skill expected for the jobs I've interviewed for is extremely high, (which is part of the reason those jobs are attractive.)Quote5) In an interview, I'm obviously not going to be so flippant and informal. For example, my fluent knowledge of English will speak for itself without pointing out, "hey did you happen to notice I have great communication skills? Yea! I'm kick arse!" C'mon.If you end up being interviewed by the same group of people who have interviewed me, they just aren't going to care how good your English skills are. What will matter to then is can you speak math? can you speak C++? If you can speak math and C++, then the lack of English skills is something that doesn't quite matter to them.

QuoteOriginally posted by: nocturne2Quote In an interview, I'm obviously not going to be so flippant and informal. For example, my fluent knowledge of English will speak for itself without pointing out, "hey did you happen to notice I have great communication skills? Yea! I'm kick arse!" C'mon. Likewise, I'm not going to draw any contrasts between my own education and that of others, but rather, I'll just highlight my diverse education and work experience and let any contrasts remain implicit.At any rate, what am I still doing here? I respect your level headed opinions fish and various others but still some are spurious such as ace's lame attempt at forging a Wharton reply lol. 'Serves me right for trying to decipher anonymous reports on an Internet forum instead of contacting known authorities on the subject. Still, it gave me a good start. Is this guy for real? Unbelievable!And this thread is almost 100 posts strong !?All talk & no action. They'll never make quants.

I knew a guy who graduated with a phd in particle physics theory from van der bilt and got a IB quant job on wall street. That should be encouraging, after all van der bilt is nowhere close to being a top school.

Just wondering why only the Ivys, wat abt other top schools like UIUC, UCLA, Umich, UCSD, (leave alone mit, berk and caltech) they r pretty good too, atleast in engineering and physics, may not be in business / management

it s only a statistical statement. and here "ivys" probably means ivy-equil, which include mit,berk,caltech,chicago, in the mean time the phd program in some ivys are not considered strong. I did meet people from UCLA. the phys. dept. of UIUC offers a finance minor so I imagine a lot of UIUC'ers out there. NYU is another example. UT Austin is also a very respected school, Georgia tech, duke, brown etc. but in any case S. IL. U. is a long shot.

QuoteOriginally posted by: whaleit s only a statistical statement. and here "ivys" probably means ivy-equil, which include mit,berk,caltech,chicago, in the mean time the phd program in some ivys are not considered strong. I did meet people from UCLA. the phys. dept. of UIUC offers a finance minor so I imagine a lot of UIUC'ers out there. NYU is another example. UT Austin is also a very respected school, Georgia tech, duke, brown etc. but in any case S. IL. U. is a long shot.Something to keep in mind is that school reputations can change pretty drastically. It's quite possible that there is some school that no one has heard of that suddenly got an injection of money and talented faculty and is in the process of creating an impressive department. One thing to keep in mind is that career services plays the role of head hunter, and if your department is creating "quality product" you can then go and smooze with employers to get people to take the resumes seriously. It's a circle because once your students get employed they start giving money back to the school which lets you pay for the faculty and facilities needed to create students which give money back to the school. There is a lot of sales and marketing involved here. On the one hand, sales and marketing means a lot of nonsense, but on the other hand, the fact that the system is based on sales and marketing means that the system isn't closed.One thing that is part of UT Austin astronomy department lore is how basically three people and oil money in the 1960's and 70's created the department out of nothing. The main benefactor of the UT business school made his first chunk of money selling used cars.Also, one probably should be careful with the term Ivy League, since neither MIT or UT Austin are Ivy League. (UT Austin in particular has a policy that anyone who graduates in the top 10% of any high school in Texas is automatically admitted as an undergraduate.) That threw me for a while since when I first got on the list some months ago, my reaction to talk of the Ivy League was that I was doomed since none of my degrees are Ivy.

QuoteOriginally posted by: twofishQuoteOriginally posted by: whaleit s only a statistical statement. and here "ivys" probably means ivy-equil, which include mit,berk,caltech,chicago, in the mean time the phd program in some ivys are not considered strong. I did meet people from UCLA. the phys. dept. of UIUC offers a finance minor so I imagine a lot of UIUC'ers out there. NYU is another example. UT Austin is also a very respected school, Georgia tech, duke, brown etc. but in any case S. IL. U. is a long shot.Something to keep in mind is that school reputations can change pretty drastically. It's quite possible that there is some school that no one has heard of that suddenly got an injection of money and talented faculty and is in the process of creating an impressive department. One thing to keep in mind is that career services plays the role of head hunter, and if your department is creating "quality product" you can then go and smooze with employers to get people to take the resumes seriously. It's a circle because once your students get employed they start giving money back to the school which lets you pay for the faculty and facilities needed to create students which give money back to the school. There is a lot of sales and marketing involved here. On the one hand, sales and marketing means a lot of nonsense, but on the other hand, the fact that the system is based on sales and marketing means that the system isn't closed.One thing that is part of UT Austin astronomy department lore is how basically three people and oil money in the 1960's and 70's created the department out of nothing. The main benefactor of the UT business school made his first chunk of money selling used cars.Also, one probably should be careful with the term Ivy League, since neither MIT or UT Austin are Ivy League. (UT Austin in particular has a policy that anyone who graduates in the top 10% of any high school in Texas is automatically admitted as an undergraduate.) That threw me for a while since when I first got on the list some months ago, my reaction to talk of the Ivy League was that I was doomed since none of my degrees are Ivy.Ooh. Could you possibly take your private conversations offline or off topic?

TJ may be less annoyed with twofish if the latter uses the term "keep in mind" more sparingly. At times this term can sound condescending.