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I think course descriptions serve more as guides to what is being offered rather than being the exact syllabi. Take MTH 9821 for example, when I took it a while back, we didn't just learn the theory but needed to code all that in C++, and the programming component of the course was large. And...

Andy, I see a lot of people on the forum who either have or working towards PhD and interested in becoming quants. We might want to have a separate thread to discuss our opinions on the topics like switching from PhD to MFE or doing MFE after PhD or doing PhD after MFE or just having one of the...

In my opinion, an online version of any program (not just FE) is only good if it is much more beneficial than its regular equivalent. That is, it should either be cheaper or give more hours of instruction per week (or something else).

Andy, I have a feeling that none of the certificate programs provides any help with job search (at least, that was the way at CMU), and I am almost certain that there won't be any help from an online certificate program.

Andy, my plan is very similar to yours :) The first step is to get a job and then if my employer decides to give me a Blackberry or Treo, I will be more than happy to have it. Otherwise, I'll get whatever will be useful on the market. I still have not decided between Treo and Blackberry.

Andy, it looks good to be true :) I thought you planned to get a phone in June or July.

Are there any? It would be interesting to find out what they offer.

Andy, maybe some people looking for info on iPhone will be interested in MFE as well :) I think we should start discussing more of current events :)

Happy Birthday and Best Wishes :)

9. You are not surprized to see your last post dated sometime in the middle of the night.

5. When people ask you "Where do you live?", you reply "quantnet.com". 6. Your happiness is directly proportional to the number of new posts.

Interesting, I think China is not the only country where certain cell phone companies cannot get through government regulations.

Interesting article, I wonder how much in the quoted words is actually true :)

Andy, why were they not allowed to sell BlackBerry in China? Sounds strange to me, but I'm not an expert.

By the way, it is nice to observe how Apple's stock has been performing in the past few weeks :) I think it is partially influenced by iPhone.

Andy, if I want to catch up with you, I should start posting ten times as much :)

Andy, you are not the only one who needs a real job :) should we compare our "once I get a job I will buy" wishlists? ;) By the way, my wishlist on Amazon has recently doubled after your posting about interesting books :)

Alain, how often do you think people replace battery in their phones? I've never done that. My phones usually break faster than batteries :)

Andy, thanks for your energy and dedication! :) Congratulations! And many thanks go to Phat whom I happen to know since 2002 :)

Andy, I have a long list of books to recommend, should I PM it to you first?

The beauty of the MFE program is that you might want to take even more courses than required :)

How nice, maybe I will be able to get into one of those companies :) Looks like my SAS work experience is even greater than C++. Andy, I'll probably ask for your help with the names of those companies after I'm done figuring out things about my PhD :)

Econometrics is a part of Quantitative Finance :) at least I think so.

When I took SAS a while back, we used the book by Cody and Smith (don't remember the name). There are several books on SAS by these authors. Also, when I used SAS at work, the Internet was my best reference, especially for various options I needed for some of the PROCs.

I was passing by a mobile phone store today and saw a huge line waiting to get... yes, iPhone :) and recalled Andy's comment.

Very interesting, never heard of this before :)

Is that a real person? ;)

Andy, I don't have a clue about whats that on the picture :) I wish I could take a picture of what I have for dinner ;)

I don't know where they came from, I'll try to find out :).

Andy, no change of plans so far? You still want to get a BlackBerry? A relative of mine has a phone (I forgot which one, maybe Treo), and he says one of the most important things for him is the pen and the ability to write on the screen. I'm not sure if BlackBerry has this feature.

Andy, back in 2000 when I was thinking about doing a degree in Financial Math, there were only a few schools in the country that offered it. I wonder what the growth rate is :) I think the number of schools offering some sort of either a degree or a track in Financial Math is doubling each year...

Andy, I think in addition to what you said, almost every school will offer some sort of Financial Math degree, just like almost every school offers a degree in Mathematics :). For example, every senior CUNY college will have its own Financial Math degree :).

Nice :) Russians eat pelmeni, which is some sort of ravioli :)

Can we pour wine from a number of bottles somewhere and then let people drink? For example, choose N people, divide 1000 bottles among the N people, so everyone gets 1000/N bottles. Pour a little bit of every 1000/N bottles into separate bottles and let those N people drink. Assuming even tiny...

Put the feather in the box of corn flakes, say magic words, take it out and touch the ball, the ball will attract to the feather :)

Interesting question :) I'm in a room and the ball is deep in the ground :) what kind of room is that?

I would retry :) Especially because I like Baruch so much that now I can't leave it :)

BS can get us MS :)

I agree with Andy. PostBac option at Columbia can be viewed as a nice additon , but not a substitute for an MS degree in FE. Fordham is not quite known, and we don't know what will happen to them in the next few years. The best thing to do, as Andy said, would be to take a few math courses...

Happy Birthday and Best Wishes!

A couple from me Quants United or Quants United in Network

How about if we vote for some of the suggestions? I personally like the two Network of future Quants Quantnet : Where Quants Meet We need to have word "Quant" in the slogan and mention "Network".

Rudin himself wrote a good book on Analysis. Also, there are two books I would like to buy one day Introductory Real Analysis by Kolmogorov and Fomin and Elementary Real and Complex Analysis by Shilov. By the way, (\delta) and (\epsilon) are excluded from Calculus taught in the US; they are...

Amazon has it listed offered by other "used and new" sellers.

Any other disadvantages of Dell besides that it is a couple of grams heavier? :) It is fine with me that it is heavier if I can save a couple of hundred dollars :)

It depends on how you use it. I don't carry mine around every day, but take it with me when I travel (instead of carrying the desktop) :)

Ikenna, The QMM program was created from Operations Research. They will teach you Monte Carlo Simulation but it will be applied to industry (like factory simulation, supermarket simulation). As far as I know, the MFE program at Baruch has a significant amount of Monte Carlo Simulations...

Ikenna, Andy is right, I meant Financial Engineering. FE stands for Financial Enginering on this forum (and in quant finance community, I think :)). And when I said QMM I meant Quantitative Methods and Modeling (a degree from Baruch's CIS/STAT department). The reason I'm mentioning it is...

Hi and Welcome, Ikenna! I'm just curious why do you want to change your major from CIS to QMM and not to FE if you are interested in Finance?

... I don't think it worked in my case, I don't see the Google Toolbar :)

I guess Google is interested in having Google Toolbar installed on our machines :) I'm going to uninstall Firefox and install it with Google Toolbar :)

I don't think laptop is a must-have :) but it is certainly a good idea to buy one. I have a 15" wide-screen Dell laptop and so far like it. I used to have an HP Compaq but something related to the display broke down and the only way to repair was to get a new display, which cost like a new...

If I already have Firefox installed, then ... ?

Very interesting :) It looks like the STAT class that was planned to be offered in the Spring is different from the one to be offered in the summer. At least I'm not the only one who would like to have more statistics in the program.

I think Stochastic Processes is the best choice. A course on differential equations might also help, a C++ course is also a good idea.

Nice joke by Microsoft :) but maybe some people would buy a phone like this if it gets manufactured ;)

Cingular won't let me upgrade my phone until July, so I hope people won't be able to telecommunicate by superwave thoughts by July. I will take a week off from school and study cell phone forums ;)

I hope that by the time I decide between BlackBerry and Palm Treo most providers will have Hi-Speed Internet and I won't need to choose my provider just because of that :)

Woody, since you mentioned AT&T. How is AT&T related to Cingular? Somewhere on their website, Cingular has a phrase "Cingular is now the new AT&T". What has happened to AT&T? Is it a part of Cingular or a separate company?

My Nokia can get a maximum of 100 Kbps, which is OK only for browsing web in one page :) It seems like in addition to the phone, we need to carefully research service providers.

Andy, thanks for the links! Looks like I have a lot of info digging and phone hunting coming this summer :) I wonder if any wireless carrier has a feature where you can get 2 phones and see which one you like and return the other after one month :)

Alain, thanks for the information :) If I buy Palm Treo and we all will be around this forum at that time I'll ask you a few questions. High speed wireless internet is a great thing, sometimes I'm using my Nokia as wireless internet provider but its too slow :)

Andy, besides being with the crowd on Wall Street :) what other advantages do you think Blackberry has over Palm Treo? What are the things that Blackberry can do that Palm treo cant? The way I'm thinking is the following. If Palm Treo runs some sort of Windows, then there should be more...

What do you think about Palm Treo 750? Looks quite similar to BlackBerry. Most features are the same. Question for all: which one would you choose? :)

John, I know about S-Plus and I did a little bit in FinMetrics, but I'm not sure if all of us here have access to S-Plus and FinMetrics :)

There is a million other things you can do in R like regression, time series analysis (including ARCH and GARCH). I will see if I can make R price options :)

Sometimes when you import a dataset as a table, R will not let you perform certain operations on it as it is. In this case, the table needs to be transformed to a matrix. Let say we imported the table 'stocks' above and want to calculate means, standard deviations, and covariance/correlation...

If - Else statement Very simple to write if(something==1) { # or < or > and maybe other comparisons variable1=2 variable2=4 } else{ variable1=0 variable2=0 } For Loop x = c(rep(0,10)) # simple initialization for(i in 1:100){ x[i]=i }

Functions in R Functions in R are easy to write. As mentioned before, R processes commands line by line. However, if you put { on a line, R will not process your commands until it sees } . Functions utilize this technique. For example we can write a function calculating mean and standard...

Input/Output From/To a File There are several ways you can import and export data to and from R. These are the ones I use. If you have an Excel table you can save it as a text file with TABs separating columns and use the following command to import data to R. #The text file is called...

There is a great program in Financial Engineering at Baruch College of CUNY! Here is the link http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/math/masters.html You can be a part-time or a full-time student.

R can generate random numbers from many distributions. For example, to generate random numbers from the log normal distribution with given mu and sigma, do the following (mu and sigma are the mean and standard deviation of the LOGNORMAL distribution, m and s are parameters for lognormal...

In this thread, I will be posting interesting R examples that will give you a flavor of what R is. You can download R for free at http://www.r-project.org (there was a discussion about downloading R or S-Plus elsewhere on the forum). One good thing about R is that it is a free program and if...

Well :) I have Nokia 9300 and don't really like it, every time I'm on the Internet I have to scroll to see whats on the screen. Need a bigger screen, plus it does not support advanced features of the Internet (can't read forum from my phone).

One big advantage of Blackberry is the keyboard, helps a lot typing e-mails. Maybe I'll get Blackberry for myself one day.

Blackberry 8830 looks more impressive to me :) I don't know about iPhone, nice picture but thats all I can tell.

Yep, probability is very difficult. Especially parts that deal with measure theory. One day I hope to be able to read Billingsley book, for example, and say how easy it is :)

I think I can add a couple of things, since I have the above mentioned Certificate in Math from CMU. I can only talk about CMU, not familiar with CQF. I am not sure if the Math Certificate is the hardest of all but it definitely gives you the core of the Computational Finance. Also, I don't...

Andy, agree 100%. I think the best thing to do is to use every opportunity to learn more. Plus, whatever you learn always keep the notes so you can get back to them when needed in later courses.

Andy, do we have (or should we have) a section in the forum with suggestions about interesting books one might want to read (just like you mentioned the C++ book). Actually, that Savitch book was my first C++ book as well :) 2 books to be exact, there is another one on Data Structures.

The most interesting, for me, is Stochastic Calculus taught in "Stochastic Processes in Finance"

Its nice to see that the MFE program is getting better and better (and as a result harder to get into) every day :) I remember the year 2002 when I was doing QMM and taking Numerical Linear Algebra class :)

I think I can comment on this :) since I have MS in the above mentioned QMM and now finishing my MS in FE. MS in QMM, in my opinion, is mostly for those who already have jobs and need an extra quantitative boost. For example, they will teach you SAS and R, and you can surprise your boss by...

From what I know, R is a free version of S-Plus. Most of the functions are the same, S-Plus has more features. The course description mentions that R or S-Plus will be taught.

Andy, thanks a lot! I've been hoping to take a course like this since 2002 :)

Andy, what class would that be? Do you know anything about MTH 9841 Statistics for Finance being offered some time soon? Also, I think it would be a good idea to offer a class with some R or S-Plus component.

Andy, you can count me as one of those who took Stats courses :) Actually, I think every MFE student should take a Statistics course. Or at least have a solid understanding of Regression and know a little bit about standard deviation.

It all depends on personal interests. Some people may do great in Finance without ever hearing about Econometrics :) I have not taken any Econometrics from the Graduate School, but I'm thinking about taking the two courses that Andy mentioned after I graduate. I know that there used to be...

Some people, like me, travel 1h 45min (sometimes more) each way :) and I live in Brooklyn.

I agree with Andy. You need to look at each individual program: courses offered, contents of couses, etc. What makes you decide where to go is what you want to do with your degree. Also, one other advantage of Baruch's MFE is the price. I'm personally interested in applications of Statistics...