@sammy_capital: The most useful quant career roadmap is 20 years old, 400 pages long, and contains no roadmap. Instead, it contains the…

The most useful quant career roadmap is 20 years old, 400 pages long, and contains no roadmap. Instead, it contains the real career paths of 25 people who built quantitative finance. How I Became a Quant was compiled in 2007 from first-person accounts by researchers at AQR, Morgan Stanley, Bloomberg, Barclays, RiskMetrics, Merrill Lynch and SAC Capital. No recruiters. No course sellers. No rewritten job descriptions. The contributors explain how they moved from mathematics, physics, computer science and academia into trading, portfolio management, derivatives and risk. Their routes rarely followed the modern formula of degree, internship, interview preparation, job. Some entered through research. Others built models for problems Wall Street had not yet recognized. Several arrived through accidents that could never be reproduced. But the same pattern appears repeatedly: deep technical ability becomes valuable only when attached to an expensive financial problem. Bookmark this PDF before building your quant roadmap. It shows the careers behind an industry that now hides its hiring process behind puzzles, prestige and rejection rates. All 400 pages are available free through NYU.