Career in finance/data analysis?

[gmDevi]

Hi guys!

I have a B.Sc. in physics in Italy and I'm about to choose my Master of science. I realized, while working on My B.Sc., that I don't really want to work in a lab, so I'm looking for other possibilities other than the usual theoretical/condensed matter/medical physics. A University in Italy offers a course in Complex Systems, and I'd be able to take courses in Micro/macro economics, Statistics, Dynamical Systems and other economics courses as well as do a lab in Numerical analysis. My question is: is the job market in finance ripe for people with these kind of skills in Europe (I specifically mentioned finance; however, if you can think of a field in which I could use the skills acquired please say so)? Would it be worth it to pursue this from a potential employment point of view?

Thanks in advance for the answer.

Marco

 

[gleem]

In a recent copy of the American Institute of Physics magazine PHYSICS TODAY is an article on physicists in data science noting that the demand for data scientists is booming across industries as retail, automotive, banking, health care as well as the non-profit and government sectors. The article states that data science is a marriage between statistics and computer science . Because this area is focused on specific types of problems there are what is know as boot camps springing up giving enrollee's instruction in combinations of coding, math/statistics and machine learning plus hands on experience and assistance with finding a job. Such boot camps can be free or cost up to 20,000 euros. Some of the camps are for individuals to current or prospective employee of companies.

There is a camp in London called S2DS, one in Berlin called Data Science Retreat, one in New York called Data Science Academy and one in Brussels called di-academy. to name a few. As an example it gives an Italian Ph.D. in physicist from Sapienza Unversity in Rome who had worked on applying mathematical theories from complex systems to linguistics. She did a lot of data mining and numerical modeling but needed to improve her machine learning. She now works in retail.where some of her projects use probability of words appearing together and applies machine learning to train an algorithm to recognize a product..

About a third of people in these boot camps have doctorates and about half masters with some bachelors. In the US the jobs for data scientists have increase 6 fold since 2012.

On a personal note I think it is of value to know as much about the area you wish to work in as possible. although it is not strictly necessary.