Computational Finance -- job for the brainy

A young man (name is Sean) I know did summer intern this year in the biggest financial company of our city. When the summer was over, Sean told me that he was one of the lucky few (among 20 interns) getting a job offer from the company. Not finished school yet, starting this fall, Sean will spend half of his time work in the company, half at school; he can work full-time after finishing his MS degree in a new field - Computational Finance.
I did some research on this new field. Before, when Wall Street or other type of financial institutions need someone to do computational modeling work, they can only hire people trained in physics or math, since no other programs offered in-depth trainings on the computational modeling. However, those people didn't have financial education, albeit smart. So those hiring decisions were somewhat compromised.
In the past few years, several universities (Carnegie Mellon, U.C. Berkeley, U. of Illinois ) have established Computational Finance MS programs - some school also offered Ph.D program (Purdue Univ.) - to equip students with both computer smarts and financial instincts. Unlike the manufacture industry, the financial ( service) industry has been going strong for the last decade, and will likely continuing to do so. Along with the proliferation of databases and computer modeling, Computational Finance is becoming another embryonic job for the brainy, although not in large quantity.

JOBG numbers

What is the JOBG number? Let's say during year 1999-2000, 93% of students at Washington University's Olin School of Business received Job Offer By Graduation (JOBG) in their fields of study, then the JOBG number was 93%.
I coined the term JOBG. The JOBG number is determined by the quality of the college's education program, the marketability of the program, the quality of the students pool, and the job market conditions in general. In a good job market, such as the one in 1999-2000, the JOBG number of 93% was rather a average one among many educational institutions.
Between 1987-1997, DePaul University (Chicago) offered a computer training program teaching Mainframe programming skills (JCL/COBOL) to people who wanted to make a career change. During that time, JCL/COBOL programming were perceived as dinosaurs, not even being taught by many universities. But those skills were still needed by many blue-chip companies; so this training program had it's niche. The program took only seven months to finish, and many students were unemployed at the time; but the program's average JOBG number for those 10 years was 88% - this was outstanding, if you know how bleak the job market condition was in those years.
As a comparison, during the same time frame, the Chemistry Ph.D program of Harvard University had a average JOBG number of 75%. Some Ph.D recipients needed to continuing on for about 2 more years of post-Doctoral studies before landing a job in the field.
A low JOBG number of a college's education program always indicating some thing questionable about the marketability of that program, or the quality of the education/students. A friend of mine, before her son recently enrolled in the Actuarial Science major at University of Illinois, called the school inquiring the program's JOBG number from the previous year -- and the number was 99%. My friend and her son knew they made a big, but secure and rewarding investment.

America's most dangerous jobs

CNN(Money) just published the America's most dangerous jobs list I was a bit surprised that police force and fire fighters are not on the list.

Industrial Designer - a hot job ?

Although Industrial Designer jobs were high-lighted in media recently, the over-supply of graduates keep educators anxious.