How much programming is required for financial engineering?

As a new PhD student, is a strong background in computer programming required in order to start research in computational aspects of chemical engineering? Or can one start from the scratch with just the preliminary knowledge and learn more programming on the way?

• Answer:

  If you can call yourself a modeler at the end of your PhD then you are an expert in properly setting up problems, are very adept at the methods used to solve them, and have enough programming knowledge to accomplish these two things. I would say that a strong background is not required but some background certainly is. The group I'm working in does purely computational work but we have a group code that is maintained by a permanent member of the research team so the need for me to write a large program for my thesis was pretty much eliminated. I do modify code on a daily basis and certainly write my own scripts to perform a lot of data analysis but my coding experience coming in was limited to MATLAB and working knowledge of FORTRAN and Python. I have had to learn C/C++ while in the group. These days, groups face a bit of a choice. They can either have each student produce his own code or use another. When a student writes their own then they are limited in the scope of the problems they can solve. If the group maintains a code, they can solve very complex problems but the students often don't learn the coding or the mathematics/algorithms quite as well. So it really depends on the group you want to go into. If you choose a more fundamental group, you'll probably be developing your own code, to solve more fundamental problems. Other groups will either maintain codes or employ/modify widely available codes requiring much less programming experience. That said, I believe that most chemical engineering professors will tell you that they will prefer strong science fundamentals over strong programming fundamentals. Programming for the most part can be learned and the type of programming being done in these situations is usually fairly basic whereas the science and mathematics being studied are really the heart of the PhD. Even the people I know who came from more fundamental groups were not adept programmers at first. Then again, lack of programming skills is probably why scientific codes tend to be poorly written and/or optimized and why computer scientists hate us.