Well @theemilyaccount had a nice thread on career advice in quantitative finance today and I've promised a bunch of people in DMs that I'd eventually do the same. So here are a few thoughts.

1) First of all, everyone takes their own path, some paths are more well trodden and some are more unusual. Recognize that all career advice is informed by the experiences of the advisor, and don't let any of it make you feel boxed in or like you don't fit "the mold".

2) In school, IMO if you are interested in quantitative finance (broadly defined), you are best served getting a strong technical background. The exact degree or field doesn't really matter. But you want to get really comfortable with applied math, statistics, and programming.

Its easier to learn the technical fundamentals well in school and build on those with your job experience than it is to back into the technical skills while you're working in a less technical job.

Its great to demonstrate genuine interest in the field for recruiting out of school, but the most common types of entry level employers in the field (at investment banks, asset managers, prop trading firms, HFTs) place little value for general 'business' or 'finance' classes...

And even less on investing experience, outside of just demonstrating that you're interested in the field. Don't try to oversell your day-trading exploits in an entry-level job interview straight out of school.

2) The most common entry-level roles you should be looking at are in larger organizations with entry-level recruiting programs. Investment banks, commercial banks with quantitative groups, asset managers, proprietary trading firms, high-frequency market makers.

These organizations have the scale to train a new class of juniors every year, and find it easier at scale to train people from scratch in the ways of the company rather than retrain people coming from somewhere else. You'll learn a lot and start building a network.

You may hate working for a large soulless feeling corporation, and I totally get it (I'm the same way). But its the equivalent of going to residency after medical school: its where you learn how to apply your basic technical skills to real-world problems.

3) After 3 years of experience, you're in a very different category. You're still junior, but you understand blocking and tackling, you understand markets and financial products, you have sat next to senior people and had them teach you.

In an investment bank's markets division, you're now an associate. If you're a trader, you're working on a team that rotates coverage of different sub-books. If you're a strat, you're doing a lot of the work that goes out to clients, even if your boss's name is on it.

You see your boss making more money than you. One option is to stick around and try to get your boss's job eventually. What you need to recognize is that your boss's boss is in her job because she's really good at internal politics in large organizations. Are you?

4) IMO, the optimal time to leave big corporate life, if you're going to do it, is in the 3-5 years of experience range. That is because you learn a ton of generalizable skills in the first 3-5 years that translate to a wide range of roles in the investment industry.

After the first 5 years, an increasingly large part of the skills and experience you gain, that are associated with higher comp within the bank, are specific skills related to managing large trading organizations and personally winning within a large organization.

How to manage up in the most efficient way; how to align yourself with the faction of senior management that's most likely to win the next round of the attrition war; etc.

But having been in a large organization for 3-5 years, you will have met a lot of people internally and externally and had a chance to build a decent network. And smaller firms on the buyside are looking for people with your skills and at your level of seniority.

They're generally not interested in paying up for the internal bureaucratic skills of the Goldman MDs, with some exceptions (e.g. in the biggest hedge funds which have huge client service machines and hot brands).

(ok daddy day care time! more later maybe)

If you decide to stay in the mega institution land, there's nothing wrong with that. Its a different path to some extent. Beyond some point the prospect for advancement will be focused on managerial roles and/or more direct client facing roles (e.g. sales strats).

If you look at moving to a smaller firm, could be a good opportunity, but its important to evaluate what that opportunity looks like. You have a quantitative skill set. If the role a quant research role, does the firm have an existing quant function?

Does it have a culture that values quantitative research and integrates it into its process? It can sound appealing to be the first or only quant (look how much value I can add!!) in a firm of otherwise non-technical people, but in practice this is usually a trap.

More often than not you either find yourself being told to come up with models that validate what the team already "knows", because it looks good with investors; or to do magic of one sort or another that isn't realistic.

In these kind of roles, you have to put a very strong emphasis on clear and precise communication of technical content to non-technical audiences, but IME its almost always a struggle, versus organizations that have at least some history of integrating quantitative work.

For example, many fundamental long/short equity firms now feel (or are told by investors) that they need a more "quantamental" approach, do internal factor modeling, use data to better validate their process... and that's a good idea! but ...

it usually doesn't work in practice, because fundamental equity managers are generally not good at knowing how to manage quants and direct a relevant quantitative R&D process, and its more of a reactive thing ("we should have") than a proactive thing ("i believe in it")

IME there has been very high turnover in these kind of seats.