sci.op-research

Thanks everyone! These answers have been extremely useful. I am taking
a look at those resources. Special thanks to SteveM for the very
insightful overview.

A.L.: I am at a college in the United States, looking for a job pretty
much anywhere, but probably in the US.

Rex

On Feb 3, 2:06 pm, SteveM wrote:
> 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