The graduates Story....
How I got the job
I sent an e-mail to Steve at the GRB about another job which they were advertising on one of the myriad graduate recruitment websites. It turned out I'd already applied for that job independently, but he recommended that I be put forward for this job. And what a wise recommendation that was, because a couple of tests and interviews later I got the job.
What I love about it
It's a cliche to say that it's a cliche to say that it's the people that make the workplace, but it's true on both levels of cliche. It's quite a young department, with lots of recent graduates, and even the more senior people - both in terms of age and position - are thoroughly genial. In short: it's a nice informal atmosphere.
In my actual work, with experience, it's the freedom which I have come to appreciate most. Freedom to develop in the directions that interest me, freedom to approach analysis largely as I see fit, and freedom to manage my own time. I've had plenty of opportunities to learn, which is important to me - in part through training courses, but also through consulting various resources and experimenting in the process of doing my work. More latterly, it's been satisfying to be able to help other analysts in what I might optimistically call my areas of expertise.
My first day
My car had broken down the weekend before I was due to start, so I had to get a lift in on my first day, and in the confusion I managed to forget the paperwork I?d been sent. It was an inauspicious start at best; thankfully it did get better. I don't think I did any work that day, but was introduced to everyone in the department, given a tour of the building - and found someone to car share with for the rest of the week.
Typical day involves
In general terms, my day-to-day job involves drawing conclusions from data, be it a couple of hundred observations or millions of them. But that doesn't mean that I?m using sophisticated statistical methods all day every day; there are opportunities for that in the department, but clever statistics aren't for me. My task usually is to extract and check data - ordinarily the smaller part of my job - then work with it to some end. That might be something as simple as identifying a trend, or as open-ended as searching for criteria to identify subsets with a concentration of a given property.
That?s not all there is to my job though: results have to be communicated to the relevant people, be it in writing or verbally, and it's not uncommon for other departments to be involved in some way.
Things I'd wish I'd known when I was at uni!
It would have been nice to have had a better idea about the sort of companies that actually want mathematicians; to know that finance isn't necessarily an awful place to end up, and more about the varying roles that fall under the 'analyst' umbrella. And to know that when adverts ask for a degree in a general area ('numerical', 'scientific', or even 'any') there are often vastly preferred degrees within those areas, and that that's where agents come in useful.
