How hard is it to switch fields?

[Dr Transport]

If your advisor is smart and they know you want to go into industry, they will help you get the skills to succeed in industry. My advisor told me about 6 months after I started working for him that I cold make it as a faculty member in a liberal arts school with a masters program as the highest degree or as an industrial researcher. He has revised his thoughts and has told me that I could be a faculty member guiding PhD students, but he still believes that I should be in industry because I have too much fun running from project to project over the course of a year or two.

 

[twofish-quant]

What kind jobs do Finance PhDs?

Strangely enough, I've never met a non-mathematical finance Ph.D. in a professional capacity. I hear they exist. The mathematical people that I know with Ph.D.'s from finance departments are essentially applied statisticians that work on time series data, and are wizards with Matlab and R.

So, no specific numbers. At any rate, what do Finance PhDs do, that Economics/Finance BS people can't do?

People with bachelors degrees plug numbers into spreadsheets. People with masters degrees write the spreadsheets. People with Ph.D.'s write the formulas that get put into the spreadsheets.

Do their jobs involve the same kind of work they did in graduate school, like with physics PhDs?

If I meet one, I'll ask. The fact that I've never run into a non-geek finance Ph.D. in a professional capacity (and I'm not sure what they do) illustrates the point that I don't have a finance job, I have a science/engineering job that happens to be in a financial firm.

 

[twofish-quant]

Also adviser attitude matters a lot. I didn't get much in the way of practical advice in going into industry from my adviser, but I got a lot of moral support which was really important. If your adviser thinks less of you as a human being if you go into industry (mine didn't, but some do), then it's going to be very uncomfortable for you.