Peter completed his doctorate in physics at UCD with Steven Carlip in 2005, researching the semi-classical theory of gravitation. He decided to forgo looking for a postdoc, and instead, taught for a short while before landing a job as a quant developer at Fitch Ratings. After completing a masters in Financial Engineering he landed a quant position at Fitch Ratings working on various types of mortgage and credit models. From there he worked at a Canadian fintech firm named Algorithmics, IBM doing general risk management, a stint modeling highly exotic derivatives at SMBC in Tokyo, and is currently a senior Financial Engineer at State Street Bank, working on a Fintech product, primarily in structured finance.
Finance is an extremely rewarding, profitable, and fun career path for anyone who finishes a degree in physics and asks themselves "what next?" Finance has the reputation for being stodgy, conservative, overly formal, and dull. This stereotype may have been true at some point in the far past, but it's certainly not the case today. It's especially not true for the applied mathematicians of Wall Street, known as "quantitative analysts", or "quants", for short (the new term for us is "financial engineer", or "FE"). The atmospheres that I've been exposed to have largely been academic, congenial, progressive, and forward thinking, I was very pleasantly surprised.
I plan to relate my own path from newly-minted PhD to senior financial engineer who helps create and maintain models that process over 32 trillion dollars a day. Additionally, we'll go over how the FE career space is structured, some of the types of things we do (like physics, it's a very, very broad field), and how people generally get jobs. We'll discuss peripheral things as well, such as fine-tuning quality of life versus compensation, the types of people you'll meet, etc.
