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Good luck finding quant work. In today's market place, most quants are PHD's in the hardcore sciences such as Physics or Math. Also, quants are located in the tri-state area. If you do have interest in becoming a quant, computer science as an undergrad then financial engineering can also be a good path but finance and/or accounting is probably not going to cut it and I am speaking from experience in this area.

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yea, if i could program i'd be a quant by now lol.

you need academic quality modelling skills in addition to computer science graduate level programming skills.

you need to be able to take a model from theory to practice, backtest it, evaluate it, and make it run by itself.

furhter, as mentioned, quants are typically in tristate area and a majority of the time refer to PhD in math, finance, physics, engineering + computer skills.

DE shaw and many others though hire undergraduate-graduate level quant analysts.

not an easy thing to break into. if i had a "do-over" it'd be to be a sick computer programmer.

Barron

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um, no. while DE shaw and some others may specifically want math/comp sci kids with no finance background, many quant shops are perfectly happy to have an econ or finance undergrad, as long as they have a modicum of programming ability. believe it or not, quants need to have economic intuition and a knowledge of financial instruments, not just the ability to work with c++ and stochastic calculus. it really doesn't take that much programming skill to backtest a model, but you have to be smart enough and have the intuition to come up with reasonable things to test and interpret the results once you do.

that being said, the above is really geared towards the hedge fund world .. I'd imagine sell-side shops have more PhD's and more pure math guys.

sincerely,
just out of undergrad and working at a quant fund.