I have been accepted on the following courses1)Oxford MSc Math and Comp Finance 2)LSE Financial Mathematicsand do not know which one to attend or if I should attend at all and continue working as I have been to a few second round interviews My background are as follow, 2.5 years in the armed forcesBEng(Hons) Electronic and Electrical Engineering(top results) and PhD Digital Signal Processing both from a top redbrick russell group uni.I have work as a C++/C# VBA developer for a financial software firm for 2 years and got made redundant.Reasons for doing the course.1)Redunancy2)Desire a 'Top' university degree since that is what they want in Finance (Oxbridge, LSE, IC , Warrick, seems like 99% of people in the industry are form there)3)Gaining more knowledge in Financial Mathematics4)Move into a more Quant/Trading/Research job upon graduationAny ideas if I am doing the right thing? Any comments appreciated.

Start reading newspapers and bloomberg.

"Desire a 'Top' university degree since that is what they want in Finance (Oxbridge, LSE, IC , Warrick, seems like 99% of people in the industry are form there)"According to my data, it is a lot less than 99%, but I take the point. Also, the Russell group membership is terribly out of date as a measure of the quality of UK universities, and especially not great for quant work.Belfast and Cardiff are only there for political reasons, they never were in the top 20 by any respectable measure, Belfast in particular failed to do well because of overtly racist admission policies.You do seem to have a very good base for some sort of algorithmic trading, signal processing although a niche can be quite profitable for someone like you. I might consider doing Statistics at one of these universities, which is also cheaper.But... I have to say your English is quite disgraceful for someone who has > 7 years education in Britain, and has presumably worked in an English environment. I always put little weight on the parts of job specifications that always say "good communication skills", but you fall below that gentle filter.Today, not tomorrow, you need to start reading books in English, plus get a subscription to the Economist. I commend the works of Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams and John Grisham for this task. You're not convinced are you ?Look up what I do for a living. About the time you were looking for your first job, someone with a Russell (not Oxbridge) BSc/PhD in signal processing got the highest offer we ever saw for a newbie, £ 90 K + bonus + stuff. For the avoidance of doubt that was from day 1.This candidate had never worked in banking, but could do C++, SP, and express themselves well. They were not an English speaker by birth just like you, but they had three of the largest banks bidding for them with enough vigour that I had to spend a bit of effort calming them down.You got a job in a s/w house.They gave presentations on their work, to an audience that was about 50% non-native English speakers, that is not all that rare in banking. If a native speaker finds it hard to understand you, then an Italian, Russian or German is going to have real problems and simply stop bothering to understand you in interview.Your decision to only hang out with your own ethnic group at university has cost you >100K already, over your career, that figure will probably grow another digit.You can fix this now. You're not stupid, you just made some bad choices, fix them.If you only care about brand go to Oxford. We don't publish a list of "top schools", partly because it is not a list, but a matrix since different managers view each school differently. Most put LSE and the FinMath at Oxford at roughly the same level, but where they do express a preference Oxford is ahead.

Thanks for your advice and I have probably got my answer as to which university I should attend. I do respect the amount of experience you have in the field and appreciate the fact that advising people on how to better themselves is pertinent to your profession. I also understand the purpose of my thread was to seek advice and not to waste our time precariously debating on some miserly and irrelevant issue like my standard of English. I might have misrepresented myself(or perhaps my English really sounds abnoxious) to make you arrive at your conclusions. You have actually enlightened me to the fact that I tend not to express myself properly which has wilfully or not led to lost opportunities. But I thought should clarify myself as leaving this thread unreplied will imply what you said about me was correct and please do understand that its nothing against you. I am Singaporean which meant English was and is still my first language. I might have an accent slightly different to the native English speaker but that gulf of difference has slowly been converging and will probably continue to do so. I would like to think that I have more English mates than the average ethnic chinese in the UK (at least I play footy with them and a couple of pints after that on a weekly basis) and not to forget the Arabs, Europeans and Africans colleagues that I had in Uni.I did 2 years of my undergraduate degree in the UK and that cost me £24000 all inclusive. Fortunately, my PhD was fully funded by the ORS+++. (Sadly, I would have to pay for the Oxford MSc) Ironically, I have been subscribing to the economist for the past 3 years and just renewed my memebrship for a further 3. Well, well, reading that has obviously not done any good for my English I supposed! LOL! Ultimately thanks for your advice and I could see where you are coming from and I agree that I do need to brush up my writing ability . Your advice could have been critical to landing a job.Cheers

lol.As a matter of interest Dominic which area of SP is the hot area? Digital or statistical?(I guess that latter)Also, what job did that person get? I imagine not as a regular quant but a quant trader of some sort?

Barny, my information is 2nd hand from pathologically secretive people, but yes I agree that stat SP is more commonly used.Of course as a contrarian seeing this as a finite sum game that would cause me to work on DSP techniques for algotrading, but I have no evidence of that actually happening.Sorry kengguanng if I was too harsh, but it is a major issue for many people, and it hurts them more than me, but hurts me enough that I still get annoyed.Education is as you say horribly expensive at exactly the point in your life when you have least cash, but I still think you should at least explore the cheaper (and possibly more useful) stats courses.How about the PIII at Cambridge ?

Statistical signal processing, digital signal processing, those terms as as vague as they come.Signal processing that is useful in stat arb/algo trading is not signal processing per se, but some techniques that really lie in the intersection of signal processing, computer science, and numerical analysis.I am thinking about wavelets, linear and nonlinear filtering, TF analysis and noise cleaning techniques, statistical detection & estimation, machine learning, information theory, pattern recognition, and others I can't remember. You can sure learn part of this stuff in a good stat department (fwiw, best in the world is Stanford); you can also learn all this stuff from a top engineering department (eg speech recognition uses many of the techniques mentioned above).Since it never hurts to know some finance, I suggest you take the financial math master, and try to target your electives toward some of the techniques mentioned above. A master will cost you money, but will buy you time and fill a gap in your CV.