MFM program in UMN provides the opportunity to learn quantitative finance skills directly from industry professors around Minnesota and Chicago area. It holds weekly seminar on Friday evening which invites distinguished academic professor such as Steve Shreve and quant finance professional such as Peter Carr. Its student club Financial Mathematics Association (FMA) invites alumni and practitioners to come to communicate and network with current students. FMA also holds quant finance career fair and networking event each year. MFM program provides a lot of opportunities for students to participate in projects with professors or industry. There are few I must mention here. The winter modeling workshop holding each year is a 10-day workshop on Financial Mathematics Modeling every winter between Fall and Spring Semesters.Students will work in teams of up to 6 students under the guidance of a mentor from the financial modeling/trading sector. The mentor will help guide the students in the modeling process, analysis and computational work associated with a real-world financial modeling/trading problem. A progress report from each team will be scheduled during the period. In addition, each team will be expected to make an oral final presentation and submit a written report at the end of the 10-day period. The others are like several nationwide/university/CME group trading competitions, IAFE academic case competition and so on. The directors make lots of efforts in career placement. The program is improving day by day.
Minnesota Center for Financial and Actuarial Mathematics (MCFAM) where MFM program is landed in held a successful summer symposium Modeling Risk in Banking and Insurance: Catching the Next Crisis at July, 2013 which was also endorsed by IAFE (
http://iafe.org/html/MCFAMJuly2013.htm). Students and practitioners came together for an intensive three day symposium which looked at the broad overview of risk taxonomy and regulation and then delved deeper into specific risk modeling areas for both banking and insurance. In addition to the detailed sessions on risk modeling, risk leaders from Securian Financial Group, US Bank, Wells Fargo, The Travelers Companies and Allianz Life participated in a panel discussion to pinpoint the impact of new regulation on their businesses, including the challenges and open issues.
The courses in MFM program include FM5091, FM5092 which are Computation, Algorithms and Coding in Finance; FM5001, FM5002 which are Preparation for Financial Mathematics; FM 5011, FM5012 which are Mathematical Background for Finance; FM5021, FM5022 which are Mathematical Theory Applied in Finance; FM5031, FM5032 which are Practitioners Course. Most of students will complete all the coursework in two years. Besides all the financial mathematics courses, students have access to almost any course in department of mathematics, finance, economics, statistics, computer sciences and so on.
For application, the deadline is Feb 1. And first round offer will be sent out on Mar 15 and second round at May 1.