Finance

Thanks for the quick response! I am actually a PhD student at the departmen of civil engineering. I just want to take some economic courses, to get some knowledge about banking and finance and try to break into finance. But know I read about the age issue you are having, not sure if it is a good idea.
Thanks, and lets see what happens!

Jaime

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Hi Jaime (again)

If you're a PhD student, assuming that it's a 5 year long PhD, and you did your PhD after masters, after undergrad, you would be about 28 - 30 when you graduate?

If you're 28 of younger, you can still break into finance. But again, it depends on which area of finance you want to break it, finance as a whole, is a huge industry. Finance isn't really my interest, so I can't advise you specifically on how to break into it - but I guess it would primarily fall on you do to a lot of your own networking to try and meet people in Finance and hopefully secure an internship.

I don't know much about your area of expertise, so again, I can't really tell you what to do. But I do know that a lot of PhDs hired into finance tend to be technical experts and do something related to modelling - lots and lots of modelling.

I do have several suggestions for you though, just some stuff off the top of my head that you might want to try to do to break into finance.

i) Do take up a few finance courses at Tsinghua. Based on the electives offered in Fall 2011, you might want to look at Theory of Investment, Business Analysis Using Financial Statements, International Finance, Principles of Financial Engineering.

ii) Do attend the networking/guest lectures held by Tsinghua SEM. If not for anything, just to listen to the lectures (which can be pretty interesting) and perhaps meet some people in the industry.

iii) I'm not sure if you can do this, but speak to to the Tsinghua CDC and see if you can be put onto their mailing list. Once in a while, finance related jobs crop up, but they're mainly for Chinese students though because of the language required (I'm not sure if you're Chinese).

iv) There are several finance related clubs in Tsinghua SEM. You can always try to join them and participate, at least you'll have a clearer idea of finance and pick up the lingo. Always good to know the language they're talking.

Good luck to you.


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Hixxy & Chris Unknown - This is how we roll