Carnegie Mellon University Master of Science in Computational Finance (MSCF) program

Great reputation among employers

What is unique about the program
The curriculum is well structured and there are plenty of employment opportunities.

Worst things about the program
The workload is a bit excessive especially while students are stressed out to find internship/full-time jobs.

Career services
Good career services. Both investment banks and top-tier prop firms come to campus for recruitment.

Student body
Half are Chinese and Indians. Have very diverse background. Some of them are really smart. Great networks to be built from this program as students are from all around the world.

Really really less diversified class.
Most of them hate communicating with foreigners.
But they want to work in the US, that's highly weird.
I strongly do not recommend any mfin program in the US.
Students who are from ONE large country dominate the program in the US.
NO diversification.
Don't choose the mfin in the US except for Prinston. They are the last resort.

I join this program just for its so called well-known career service. But it turns out that the career service in MSCF is just homogeneous to other programs. Nothing special about the career service especially they recruit some new career staff this year. Being in this stage, I felt a bit hopeless about job-searching process.

Good to see an honest review on this page about MSCF (talking about the post before mine) Worst decision of my life to join MSCF. Reasons are perfectly given by the previous review. Rick Bryant doesn't seem to care about students learning and despite having great professors the program is unable to give a good level of academics. I know the difference because I along with a few students took the ML course from cs dept and the difference in level of academics is clearly evident.
Advice to management: Improve coursework and add more courses from SCS department and increase scope of electives. Also improve career services and ask Sondi to not act like she is doing us a favour but that she is just doing her job cause we paid for career services.
Final word: Don't come here

Hi Current Student here,
Please don't join this course if you have an offer from any of the top 10 programs. Honestly this is one of the worst Financial engineering/ Computational Finance programs in the US. Let me list down the reasons:
1. Outdated courses / Rigid coursework: except the financial data science courses every other course is practically worthless. Also the worst part is that there are no electives except in the last semester and even they are eqully bad if not worse. Its absolutely hilarious that despite having the best CS dept in the world right next to us we can leverage those resources.
2. Director is absolutely clueless: Rick Bryant is absolutely clueless about what the industry wants and is unwilling to update the coursework based on the industry preferences. He is not a technical person so it's hard for him to understand what is needed to succeed in the quant industry. Honestly the program would be a lot better without him. Steering committee please take note.
3. Non existent "career services": If you are coming to this course bexause of career services then boy did you make a mistake coz there is absolutely no career services. The most they do is list down companies which honesty is not career services.
This just the tip of the iceberg. Please reach out to me at my alternate email address marizcharles420@gmail.com. I will be happy to share more information and also put you in touch with other current students who feel the same way.
Also honestly I would suggest joining a strong data science or statistics program if you want to succeed in quant research.
Feel free to reach out guys.