WU Vienna - Master in Quantitative Finance

I personally really liked the program. My impression is that it’s very well known in Austria and Eastern Europe and it is gaining more recognition across the DACH region. I am currently working in Switzerland alongside colleagues from HSG and ETH and in my view, the program remains highly competitive and certainly does not need to hide behind these top schools.

Some positive facts (that were true at least when I did the programme):

- Big focus on programming in R as the head of the program helped shape the programming language early on and is part of the core developer team. People get really good at it and producing homework, academic reports, presentations and reproducible research. The fact that one used it in almost every course made it a unique experience.
- The coursework covers a broad mix of financial mathematics, applied statistics and corporate finance. With many electives, students can tailor their focus towards quantitative or more traditional finance topics. After the first year, you can choose between an industry track, which includes a semester-long project with a partner company (often leading to job opportunities) or a research track, where you learn to read, write and understand papers in quantitative finance. The university also hosts regular research talks and offers PhD opportunities for those interested in continuing in academia.
- The program has a very international body of students coming from mainly central and eastern europe but also US, Australia, South Korea, India and more.
- There is a big emphasis on group work and you get to interact with your colleagues a lot in class through countless projects.
- The campus is awesome and has a lot to offer in terms of study space resources and leisure activities.
- Vienna is a beautiful city and has a lot to offer for young people.
- The program is basically free for eu citizens and still very cheap for non-eu citizens. So actually top in terms of value for money.


Some room for improvement:
- The student body was comprised of a lot of people with insufficient mathematical background which made it hard for some students to get up to speed.
- The emphasis on group work sometimes enabled people to free ride on the work of their colleagues. If one could focus more on individual assessment, I think it would make it a better and fairer program.
- The student to lecturer ratio was sometimes too large. In general they should cut down on the number of students by 30% and be more selective.
- The biggest disadvantage is that Vienna is not well known for its financial industry. A lot of people seek opportunities elsewhere after finishing the program. Frankfurt, Zurich and London are popular destinations among alumnis.