Math
2 experiences · Other (2)
Math graduate stuck in defense as a software engineer. How do I move into ML or finance?
Interview Experience
I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree in mathematics. I didn’t graduate with top honors, but still with high grades, from a good Italian university. My master’s was mostly focused on CFD, FEM, and PDEs, with a small component of theoretical machine learning, but almost no practical implementation. After graduating about two years ago, I tried to get into roles like data scientist, ML engineer, ML scientist, or even finance roles such as risk analyst. The problem is that I was getting virtually no responses. Not even feedback. It felt like my profile was being filtered out immediately, probably because it was too theoretical and not practical enough. At some point I had to start working, so I joined a large Italian defense/aerospace company as a software engineer. I do like programming, to some extent. I liked what I did during university, not what I’m doing now. Here I mainly work in C and ADA, very low-level, and more importantly it’s a field I have zero interest in long term. The problem is that now I feel stuck. For about 6 months I’ve been trying to switch, but the only opportunities I get are still in defense or electronics. That would mean continuing to work at a low level, far from mathematics, modeling, ML, etc. I’ve also tried applying to finance and healthcare roles, which are two areas I’m very interested in, but it’s like I don’t exist. I feel like having this experience on my CV is “branding” me as an embedded/defense type. If I remove this experience, though, I end up with a gap of more than 2 years after graduation, so that’s not really an option. My questions are: Does it make sense to seriously invest time in ML/DL projects on GitHub to switch fields, or do they not carry much weight? How can someone realistically break into the finance sector from a situation like mine? Are there any courses or certifications that actually carry weight (not Coursera/Udemy) that could help me move toward ML, modeling, or finance? I was thinking about something similar to the CFA, but in a European context if that exists.