"It's pretty hard to do something like getting a job setting up new quant models for Soros unless you've specifically tailored your college experience to learni

"It's pretty hard to do something like getting a job setting up new quant models for Soros unless you've specifically tailored your college experience to learning how to do that." I strongly disagree. Finance is not Theoretical Physics. In Physics, the best and brightest are in Academia and have access to high-quality experimental data (unless you're doing high-energy stuff, where experimental data is hard to get). In Finance, the best and brightest are in the financial services industry, and the finance academics have no access to high-quality data because such data costs millions. Data aside, the kind of Finance which is taught in college is somewhat of a fantasy. I will be crude and claim that Academic Finance is as scientific as literary criticism... Cutting a long story short: anyone who's proficient at building models (like a physicist or a math-oriented engineer) can build models for a hedge fund without having been trained to do that in college. At D.E. Shaw they like to say that "you can teach smart people how to do finance, but you can't teach financial people how to be smart".