Fordham University Quantitative Finance program

Fordham University Quantitative Finance program

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Location
New York, NY
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  • Anonymous
  • 5.00 star(s)
Great MSQF Program! Strongly recommend!
Great tier faculty, perfect location next to Lincoln center, powerful alumni network: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/2209142
Sergei Banashko
Financial industry becomes more quantitative and competitive as employers look for strong candidates with adequate backgrounds to help them change how companies do business today in order to boost companies’ financial ratios and profit margins. Fordham MSQF is unique program with one of the largest amount of classes available in quant field and great professors that come both from academia and industry sides. Director of the program Prof. Blackburn is one of the best finance professors in the school, having many years of teaching experience.

I joined the program back in September 2015, and to be honest it’s been quite a challenge for me, with a lots of homework with short due dates.

Fordham MSQF (45 credits) is located in the center of New York City right next to Lincoln Center.

Regarding internship and job placement, there are some positions available from Fordham Carrera Center and Aluminate’s network, but Quantitative Finance/ Financial Engineering field are in demand right now, therefore, I recommend to look on your own as well – there are many opportunities in New York City, Connecticut, etc. Majority of students end up with full time offers or summer internships in large banks, Hedge Funds, Insurance companies, Federal Reserve, Credit Rating Agencies, etc.

Here you can find more information about the program: https://www.fordham.edu/info/24010/quantitative_finance
V
A very rigorous and challenging program but very effective in touching a wide range of finance and mathematics topics related to the modern day world of quantitative finance. This program consists of a curriculum that builds upon knowledge with each succeeding class. You might end up deriving the black scholes equation, for example, in three different methods in four different classes - each time giving you a new perspective on how to think about its derivation. I myself came in with no financial background, but an applied math undergrad majors with professional experience in computer science. I learned a lot about my strengths and weaknesses and what to do with each one. The professors are knowledgeable but also demanding of their students. Therefore if you aren't catching up with the material it's best not to let much time pass.

I first obtained an internship after my first year working for the New York Mets as a business analyst. Working with Python , SAS, and SQL to create a wide range of data analytics reports for various business departments.

Currently I'm working as an Operational Risk reporting developer at Guggenheim Partners - a role I was able to obtain with the help of a Fordham MSQF alumnus , who current sits a few rows behind me on the Sales and Trading floor. If you give this program your very best effort, you will be nothing short of pleased by the outcome.
jiangzhiyiqin
There is a long story to tell. Certainly, I could not finish today. I will try to write as much as I can later on. Fordham, to be honest, is the transitional point in my life, even viewed ten or twenty years later.

I came from a top 10 university in China, with its reputation being one of the earliest universities in China that opened undergraduate programs of Financial Engineering. Viewed from my master training, to be honest, teachers at my undergraduate school do not have fully technique knowledge of continuous-time finance, though they do have the intuitive understanding of all concepts and try to teach us as much as they can.

Entering Fordham MSQF, I felt extremely hard at the very beginning due to lack of training in programming. Fortunately, I had audited four key graduate courses in Financial Engineering in my last semester at my undergraduate school, I did have more knowledge of Econometrics, derivatives, and a little bit continuous-time finance (just two-weeks in Intro to Stochastic Calculus). Therefore, I spent much of my time learning coding details. However, the course schedule is too intensive that I could not learn VBA quite well in the first eight-week course called Advanced Financial Modelling taught by Prof. Blackburn. I finished half coding in the midterm exam in the fourth week and a little bit more than half coding in the final exam in the eighth week. Honestly speaking, Fordham MSQF program is more intensive than many of Econ/Fin Ph.D. programs at universities ranking around 80-120, in terms of homework and the difficulty of materials.

To be continued...
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