Qamra Khan, Imperial College London and Imperial College Business School

 

Betting professionally on football with a firm in London inspired me to undertake a Risk Management and Financial Engineering MSc. I also have a Biomedical Engineering (BEng) from Imperial College London. These experiences have given me advanced quantitative and programming skills which I hope to use in my future career.

 

My Biomedical Engineering Degree at Imperial College was an exciting blend of Medicine and Engineering . Though it was intensely competitive at times (around a sixth of my classmates were Singaporean scholars), I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge. I developed my research skills here, with my Final Year Project receiving a mark of 87.6%.

 

I graduated in during the credit crunch, and had to work as a Project Engineer in NHS hospitals for a few months. Although I did not enjoy this role, it taught me humility and to appreciate the chances I got. I then went on to work in the Quantitative Department of a fixed-odds sports betting firm. I really enjoyed this experience, which involved running models, having a stake for betting, writing code and utilising many of the skills I learnt in my BEng Degree.

 

Whilst working in this role, I sat and achieved an Actuarial exam (CT1) as a non-member of the U.K. Institute of Actuaries. Actuarial exams have notoriously high failure rates, and I studied for this exam while working full-time in a role that was completely unrelated. This was challenging but I found the material interesting, as well as the prospect of a Finance-related career. To that extent, I undertook a Risk Management and Financial Engineering MSc from Imperial College Business School, which I have just finished.

 

I was Department Representative in my BEng Degree and Academic Representative for my MSc. Both these positions involved resolving issues students had during meetings on the Student-Staff Committee.

 

I would like to use the quantitative and programming skills I have developed in my future career. In my previous role as a Quantitative Assistant, I coded in VBA Excel and MATLAB. Throughout my MSc, I was more attracted to the Financial Engineering aspects of the course .I took courses in Numerical Finance with C++ and Advanced Numerical Finance with C++ in which I had to write code to price an option. I really enjoyed these courses, and received an ‘A’ for both. Another course I found engaging was Advanced Portfolio Management which involved reading recent academic papers on derivatives, asset-liability management,etc.

 

For my Applied Financial Research Project, I coded and back-tested a basic pairs trading strategy in MATLAB. To that extent, I feel I would be suited to a very quantitative role in Finance (Quant Analyst, Risk Modelling, Actuary, Structuring) that comes with some professional qualification (CFA, Actuarial, FRM).