Rutgers University - Master of Quantitative Finance

Good things

1. The Program offers diverse choices of subjects that you can tailor for your desired career path. 45 credits are required for graduation, 30 core and 15 elective. The 30 core credits, corresponding to 10 classes, will cover all the basis subjects centering 3 core pillars: financial instruments (their structured and behaviors), applied math for finance (stochastic calculus, numerical analysis, econometrics, etc.), and programming. Courses in financial instruments are the most captivating of all three. Courses in math are more like acquired taste and may not be intriguing (if not highly challenging) for everyone. Programming courses (OOP & OOP II) are straight up not good (more on this later). Overall, you will get to learn what you need to know to get started. Then the 15 electives would be up to your plan for yourself. You can make it mathy (Optimization, Stochastic Processes, Financial Time Series, etc.), OR more on investment (Indexes & ETFs, Portfolio Management or Hedge Fund), OR more on trading (Quant Trading Strategies), OR more on data analytics (Data Mining, Machine Learning). Supposed that you can figure out what your tea is, you can customize the topping as you wish.

2. Some professors are amazing. So amazing that you will feel transformational simply being a student attending their classes. Andrzej Ruszczynski for Stochastic Calculus. 100% of students would agree on this. Stochastic Calculus, if taught in the wrong way, could kill off the interest. Prof. Ruszczynski would ease you in and make your 3 credits the most worthwhile of all. Other professors who are like veterans in the fields: Priyank Gandhi (Fixed Income), Ronnee Ades (Indexes & ETFs), John Longo (Hedge Fund or Applied Portfolio Management), Mariya Naumova. They have for students enlightening lectures and even opportunities to connect with people working/hiring in the industry.

3. Career Management Office. I can see that the team is very supportive and try their best to prepare you to the teeth. Of course, you have to put in effort to at least reach out and cooperate. They do a great job helping you practice and be ready for your application and interview.

Bad things

1. Students cheat. Fault on students, but I will give unpopular opinion here that fault on some professors as well (emphasis on some). Cheating is done for more reasons than just passing the subjects. For some classes, professors provide example midterm/final questions and have sessions to discuss solutions. These sessions help students to learn and to prepare. Other classes do not have so much clarity except for the policy and this gives students more reasons to look out for more information. Looking out done wrong leads to cheating. Students do study so very hard and only few are free riders. Cheating does not completely negate what a student has learned, but it gives the focus on the wrong things and it is simply just wrong. I highly recommend that professors help students with sample tests (which should be relevant instead of some toy examples with difficulty so not comparable to the actual exams) and discussing sessions so that they focus on the right things which is learning. I also recommend that students give themselves chances to make the most out of their learning experience.

2. Programming courses (OOP & OOP II) are not good. Not captivating, not good enough exercises to practice, not a good guidance for self-study, not practical. I gave these classes so many chances, but I just found myself wasting time. To get pass the classes and assignments in other classes, I had to do rigorous self-study. As a student who attends classes and pay for classes, I would love to be helped out a lot more. The thing that I would like to have more is a good set of assignments with increasing difficulty (easy to difficult), covering the key concepts, libraries that are frequently used in quant finance. Example use cases on how libraries and algos are used in pricing/trading/risk management would be much appreciated. After all, it would be very helpful to see the principles and math in paper come into real codes. It would be helpful that we have good examples and coding practices instead of figuring completely everything out on our own while struggling with our homework (when we have to strike a balance of whether we want to learn it right (but time consuming) or whether we should do just anything to meet the deadline.

Finally, I think MQF provided me what I need to land on my feet. I appreciate the classes and professors who are always dedicated to helping students in learning and in making a career. My takeaways are that many core classes are worthwhile and transformational and that one should not doubt to devote time and effort to make the most out of the years in MQF. The program does have a lot to offer. The downsides are there, but it does not take away the training and learning opportunities at all. By the time I left MQF, I knew that much effort has been put in to fix the cheating practice as well as the classes that are not perfect to students' needs. The program is good and improving. I personally recommend it to people who are seeking doors to promising career opportunities.

Background
B.Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering
14 months work-ex in IT sector

Career Services
The no.of job postings on Rutgers MQF career website is limited. Rutgers NB career portal is a better choice. However, over the last few months the career service of MQF improved a lot. New Career director takes every case personally. Most of us received calls or leads in the last one month. I will be working as an intern in one of the rating agencies for this summer.

Why Rutgers
Close to NY. Great chance to network
Large no.of Rutgers alumni are in Financial services and are approchable
Relatively flexible

Coursework
Wide range of electives. you can choose MBAs and MFin electives.
You can take basic courses in Finance (A very good introduction for non finance students by Prof Castelino) , programming (C++, Sql, Phyton) and Probability and statistics
Prof. Steven Dym (options. He will be teaching Fixed Income as well from 2015) and Prof. Rusczynski (optimization and Stochastic calculus) are the best faculty of this program
Financial Time Series (Mandatory course) Hw’s are very practical. However, if you lack background in statistics it will be challenging.
Term projects in Fixed income and Numerical Analysis are industry oriented
Financial Modeling I (taught by Dr. Wu, The director of the program) assignments are very practical. He emphasizes on intuition behind every concepts
You can also take exotic electives such as Quant Equity trading (based on market microstructure and technical trading), Indexing and ETFs (Includes guest speaker sessions), Applied Portfolio Management (Equity Research - Provides networking opportunity with high profile people in industry) and Compliance

Disadvantages
Course structure. It would be more beneficial if students are allowed to choose electives and core courses to specialize in a particular stream
Few courses such as econometrics are very theoretical in nature ( I did not take the course. I am writing this based on my friends review)
More interaction across all Finance specialization of Rutgers
No online refresher courses prior to join the program

Can you tell us a bit about your background?
3 years of industry experience followed by a Ph.D. in economics
I who studied part-time in the program from 9/2009 to 5/2011

Did you get admitted to other programs?
Yes

Why did you choose this program (over others, if applicable)?
Was already a Rutgers student in the Economics dept. Value of program is better than other programs

What alternative sources of info you used to learn more about the program?
Online research, compared coursework of other programs
Tell us about the application process at this program
Applied online, submitted GRE scores and grades online

Does this program offer refresher courses for incoming students? What do they offer and how much it costs?
Yes, very brief introduction to finance course (free)

Tell us about the courses selection in this program. Any special courses you like?
There are a total of 16 courses (equivalent of Ph.D. program). There is a big lack of advanced statistics courses and stochastic calculus courses. This is remedied by speaking with the director and substituting courses to make up for this lack. The courses available in the Newark Campus are unfortunately very elementary (Microeconomics, Probability, Stochastic Processes, etc). I took these in the New Brunswick (top 25 math/stat programs) and the quality of the courses is much more advanced.

Tell us about the quality of teaching
New Brunswick's courses are much more rigorous than Newark's courses. However, most professors are excellent and care about their students.

Materials used in the program
Very good texts are used (if you take the NB courses), including Shreve, Hull, O'Kane, among others. For NB's microeconomics course, Rudin is used to build the advanced models.

Programming component of the program
1 course in c++ and 1 course in java, coupled with heavy use of Matlab

Projects
Wrote a paper which described liquidity premiums in fixed income markets using Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations (this is in an elective statistics course, in New Brunswick)

Career service
Rutgers Business School's Office of Career Management was absolutely useless. I used the equivalent service in New Brunswick (Rutgers CareerKnight), providing me with interviews at major invesment banks, consulting firms, and government agencies for quantitative interviews. I received a summer internship in fixed income quantitative analytics (using CareerKnight to interview). My score below will be for CareerKnight and not RBS OCM

What do you like about the program?
Great overall financial engineering education. It is what you make of it. You can speak to the director and substitute classes (case by case basis). This will make your education much better.

What DON’T you like about the program?
Obvious gaps in the program structure coupled with absense of flexibility.
The quality of the Newark courses is abysmal (particularly microeconomics and probability). This is remedied by taking the same courses in New Brunswick. This program has a huge need for advanced statistics (particularly time series analysis). It would also need another semester of stochastic calculus. The programming aspect is a bit too simplistic.

Suggestions for the program to make it better
Add a time series analysis course (Econometrics 2, NB campus, Prof Swanson), add another semester of stochastic calculus. Get rid of the java course and add a rigorous quant dev class (Computational Finance, NB Campus, Prof Feehan). Teach microeconomics more rigorously (real analysis, topology, advanced risk models) (or take in NB campus). Get rid of probability and add a rigorous measure theory course.

What are your current job status? What are you looking for?
Offer in fixed income quantitative analytics (begin July 2011)

Other comments
This is a great program, if you take most courses in New Brunswick and use CareerKnight in NB instead of RBS OCM

Can you tell us a bit about your background?
A master's in mathematics and a PhD in a field not related to finance. GPA 4.0, GMAT 710
I studied part-time in the program from 9/2006 to 12/2010

Did you get admitted to other programs?
No, I chose not to apply that year

Why did you choose this program (over others, if applicable)?
I needed a program that would allow to take only one or two courses at a time in a flexible order and stay close to home (family circumstances)

What alternative sources of info you used to learn more about the program?
University website provided good overview of the program.

Tell us about the application process at this program
I applied offline and got positive response almost immediately

Does this program offer refresher courses for incoming students? What do they offer and how much it costs?
There was a free-of-charge week's long orientation course going over introduction to finance prior to the start of the program.

Tell us about the courses selection in this program. Any special courses you like?
The list of courses required to receive this degree is very rigid. If I remember correctly off the top of my head, there are only 2 elective courses to be selected. The core list is generally well thought-through, with one major blatant exception: the program provides no courses in time series and advanced statistics. Given that taking those courses as electives requires traveling to a different campus at odd time of the day, this effectively means that those courses are not available to part-time working students even if they realize that they lack those.

Tell us about the quality of teaching
The courses are generally skewed toward theory, but I would not say it is a disadvantage. There is some limited number of courses taught by current and former practitioners as well (risk management, numerical analysis, financial institutions). Teching quality falls within a huge range, from excellent in-depth theoretical courses (probability and stochastic processes, systems simulation) to somewhat less laudable.

Materials used in the program
Hull – Options Futures and other derivatives;
Shreve – Stochastic Calculus for Finance;
Cochrane – Asset pricing;
Etheridge – A course in Financial Calculus;
Baklawski - Introduction to Probability with R;

Programming component of the program
MatLab is used throughout many courses; C++ and Java are covered in dedicated courses (2 semesters)

Projects
Numerical analysis and Financial Risk Management Theory course (however, none are taught in this format any longer, at least to the extent of my knowledge), individual projects
Courses in both C++ and Java involve a series of programming projects, individual projects
Financial modeling II projects on pricing (again, no longer taught in the same format as the professor left Rutgers), team projects
Projects in R - probability course, individual projects.

Career service
I didn't approach career services, so the rating below is done on feedback from my fellow students

What do you like about the program?
For those students who are motivated and know what they need from a financial engineering program and research all their options, Rutgers is an excellent choice: quality of teaching is very good, and many courses, even if they don't cover the subject sufficiently, generally provide a good start for further self-education in the area.

What DON’T you like about the program?
Obvious gaps in the program structure coupled with absense of flexibility.
Also, I regret to see the program sliding from being aimed at graduate degree holders who are switching fields after several years of work experience (this is where it was when I joined 4 years ago) to traditional graduate program for fresh-out-of-college students.
Suggestions for the program to make it better
Cannot stress the absense of time series and advanced statistics courses enough. Also, making the program more flexible would be a tremendous advantage.

What are your current job status? What are you looking for?
I am employed full-time at a risk methodology department at a major bank. I am not looking for any other position right now, and chances are that I won't be looking for one any time soon if at all.

Other comments
This program provides a very good jump-start to becoming a quant, but one definitively needs to spend a lot of time studying on his/her own. If you decide to join this program part-time, research all courses and options well in advance and tailormake your schedule to make sure you don't "get stuck" between the semester schedules (some classes are only offered once a year, and given some pre-requisites are involved, one may easily end up delaying some course for more than a year). Think wise about picking the electives and try to make use of resources available in New Brunswick campus - although it may be problematic for those who work in the city.