sci.op-research

On Feb 2, 6:56 pm, Paul Rubin wrote:
> Rex Eastbourne wrote:
> > Any pointers on where a student with a strong quantitative background
> > could find the best jobs in OR?
>
> If you're lazy, I'd say look into academic positions. Worked for me. :-)
>
> Otherwise, you might want to look at the OR/MS Today classified ads,
> which are online athttp://lionhrtpub.com/orms/classifieds/.
>
> /Paul

Rex,

ORMS Today has mostly academic jobs. But you will find some
commercial companies there. The hedge funds and investment banks do a
TON of OR. Only they call it Financial Engineering. There are some
very good academic programs in F.E. Do a google search and many will
pop up Berkeley has been advertising their program heavily for some
time. Rutgers has a Masters in Math with a concentration in
mathematical finance. They used to have an OR department (RUTCOR) but
I guess it went away. I actually would have done F.E. if had matured
out when I was in grad school 20 years ago.

OR is almost exclusively a post graduate degree discipline. You need
at least an M.S. and a lot of the Wall Street houses require a Ph.D.
for their "quant jocks." Unfortunately, the discipline is heavily
populated with Asian/Indian Ph.D's who will work for next to nothing
for a green card. So you may want to ask around. That's a lot of
academic heavy lifting and the irony is you could make more with an
M.B.A. because many of the foreign quant wizards don't do people
relationships very well so don't compete for "people skills" jobs.

In terms of corporate OR, the discipline is not even recognized
anymore by most corporate M.B.A.'s who could hire you. They would not
have a clue want you meant if you said OR. There are some niche
industries though like transportation that hire OR guys explicitly.
The airlines always hire and that genuinely is a very interesting
domain to do OR.

But in most companies there is not even an OR Analyst job title. The
OR people get absorbed into the business units and line functions.
Most often they cease doing "real OR". But OR does give you a great
intellectual construct for problem solving. So that's the real
benefit in those cases. If you like F.E. I'd swap out any math
electives that don't have future utility for finance courses. Say
basic finance, capital asset management and also options/derivatives
if your school offers them.

The biggest OR recruiter by far is Analytic, www.analyticrecruiting.com.
They have a ton of job listings, but of course do not list the
companies. Although you may want to contact a few people on their
recruiting staff and see if they'd give a few minutes to discuss where
the opportunities are and perhaps toss in some contact info.

A.L. will toss in his 2 zlotys here I'm sure.

Good Luck,

SteveM