Reflections of finance in an engineer’s life: India

When do you see the need of planning finances as an ENGINEER?

As a student, though your parents may make major efforts to pay your college fees, you as a student would have to plan your finances. Right from paying for a paid seat in college vs a free seat to funding your fresher party ticket amount, your parents take care of it. The accepted culture in this aspect is ironical. When parents face this task of spending money, they crib yet pay for their children. Once it is paid somewhere a false ego of parents bloats and the act of paying for such merry gets justified. This note is for parents and students who want to state a difference and are ready to approach finances practically.

1. Personal finances: Planning personal finances at college seems next to impossible. When we inspect into the money we spend on various things and prepare a log of it, we understand how much mismanagement of money takes place. Especially in urban India, youth are not introduced into the habit of recording expenses. However, inculcating this habit would prove purposeful and useful in your career days.
2. Further education: The herd trend among engineers in India is that, after their engineering course, students either tend to pursue MS in a foreign country or get into a job. Irrespective of, whether you are following this trend or not, you need to plan your finances for further education which could masters in science, MBA or PhD as you proceed in life.
3. Your future and Career: Most students who step out as engineers engage is different worlds and turn out to be something fascinating. Youth at this juncture are seeing dreams with eyes wide open. To fulfill these dreams you need to get into the habit of financial planning.
4. Contingencies may manifest in any form. Sometimes they are harsh to handle. Spare some money aside to handle them boldly.

For your career, at a later time, you will feel that your world has expanded. You need more to survive. You opt to join a job to accomplish many personal aspirations as well as those coined with your family’s aspirations.

1. Career learning: As you start your career, you would realize that the skill sets acquired at college are not enough for you to excel. With this realizations starts your second round of learning. This includes certification courses, management programmes and other professional courses. This again demands money.
2. Living: In Indian culture children and parents are together irrespective of age. Now the trend has set in where girls and boys are building their mini forts by staying on their own to pursue their career in different cities. With this you become the owner of your life, which means you will have to pay for your living expenses like food, water, utilities, telephone and so on.
3. Your family: One fine day you have to take complete responsibility of your family and that is the day you will be proud that this article prepared you to plan your finances. You family will demand your presence as well as your material assets. So watch out and preparing from today.

HAPPY FINANCIAL PLANNING!

Financial Engineer

Engineers face a lot of trouble when they know that they are getting into Banking and Finance domain at their company. Especially the team leaders and HR managers of IT firms face, engineers cribbing about staying long in this domain to develop. With the introduction of this career, if you are an engineer, you will understand the magnitude of scope of engineering in FINANCE!

What is Financial Engineering ?

According to Zvi Bodie, financial engineering is the application of science-based mathematical  models to decisions about saving, investing, borrowing, lending, and  managing risk.

Financial engineering (FE) involves creating functional financial devices – convertible bonds, warrants, synthetic CDOs, etc.  All of us invest our money at some point into bonds, options and stocks.  FE is the science behind determining these investment options and come up with a sound formula for a safe investment avoiding volatility.

This is simplest form of understanding FE. Finance, mathematics, business, statistics are some of the key subjects one needs to study in the course of FE. Just because this is more to do with stocks and trading, we cannot ignore the science aspect. A person who chooses a career in this field have to be adept at computer programming.

Further career prospects for a financial engineer

• Quantitative analyst
• Financial analyst
• Options research
• Asset management
• Consulting
• Derivatives research
• Risk management
• Data Analyst

Some of the listed roles above require additional knowledge and qualification.

How to manage my time? Time management for students

There is no perfect solution to manage time when we are juggling with multiple things in life. HCC has studied lives of college students and suggested an ideal way to plan your week and cater time as per priority.

Before you plan, here is a short to-do list you could follow:

• List your likes and interests
• List your priorities
• Plan and anticipate any contingencies that may occur.

HCC understands that unlike other international schools and colleges, institutions in India mostly work for 6 days or 5.5 days in a week. So, here the fun time for students is definitely reduced. Mostly when we look at a student’s life we feel college and assignments are the only things they need to do. But, the fact is not the same. They have to manage their time with assignments, internals, semester exams, extra study to excel, preparation for competitive exams, internships, final year project work, sleep, food, movies, partying, sports, exercise, friends and phew! a lot more…..With this assumption let us see how an ideal week with high time optimization should look like.

You may have tweak this chart a little here and there to customize it to your course and life requirements. Now you can de-stress yourself, as you have a solution for your time.