Baruch MFE or Cornell FE

[iniesta]

hello all, ive been accepted to Cornell and Baruch MFE. which program should I choose?

 

[roni]

Depends on many things, IMO:
1) Baruch is much cheaper, is money a concern for you?
2) If you choose Cornell, you will need to find housing in the main campus area and then in NYC.
3) Baruch posts placement stats and they are very good, however, Cornell's stats don't tell much.
4) If you choose Cornell, you will be away from NYC for the first year, on the other hand, with Baruch you will be in the city throughout the program.
5) Cornell has a good name in NY and all over the country/world. However, I think Baruch is mostly well known in the NY area. Upon graduation, do you plan to work in the NYC area ?

 

[iniesta]

the only problem with cornell is that the curriculum is very weak. a lot of the courses are from the business school and are not quantitative enough

 

[roni]

Well, even though Baruch seems to be much more quantitative, I think Cornell has a pretty quantitative curriculum:

Financial Engineering with Stochastic Calculus I (ORIE 5600)

Operations Research I: Optimization I (ORIE 5300)

Monte Carlo Simulation (ORIE 5581)

Financial Engineering with Stochastic Calculus II (ORIE 5610) or Credit Risk (ORIE 5620)
or Quantitative Methods of Financial Risk Mgmt. (ORIE 5650)

Statistics for Financial Engineering (ORIE 5640)
or Time Series Analysis (ORIE 5550)

Topics in Linear Optimization (ORIE 5311) or Optimization II (ORIE 5310)
or Optimization Modeling (ORIE 4300)

Monte Carlo Methods in Financial Engineering

Computational Methods in Finance

and a few more electives. Plus, are the NBA courses designed specifically for the ORIE students or for the MBA program students?

 

[iniesta]

where did u find the curriculum?

btw, quiet frankly, the only thing i dont know already from that list is stochastic calculus

plus, i see no need so many courses on optimization and monte carlo, seems redundant to me

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Where are you located? Can you make a trip to both programs and meet people there?
I reckon the cost is small all things considered.

 

[iniesta]

im not from US

 

[Joy Pathak]

There are two students in my year at Baruch MFE who were accepted to Cornell also and picked Baruch MFE over it. One of them even mentions it in their intro on the website in the student section.

I think Baruch MFE was the best fit for them and thats why they picked it. Pick the university that is the best fit for you. Cornell is a great name and they have a great campus in Ithaca.

 

[roni]

where did u find the curriculum?

btw, quiet frankly, the only thing i dont know already from that list is stochastic calculus

plus, i see no need so many courses on optimization and monte carlo, seems redundant to me

http://www.orie.cornell.edu/orie/brochures/upload/HandbookF10-Nov10.pdf

I think Cornell will let you waive some of the courses if you've taken them. I'm not sure if it applies to all student or only to those who went to Cornell undergrad.

 

[Tom Maloney]

It depends on what you want to do, what do you want to do after MFE? I went to undergrad at Cornell, and if you want quantitative, you can find it.

Cornell FE info is here: http://www.orie.cornell.edu/orie/brochures/upload/HandbookF10-Nov10.pdf
I like that the 3rd semester puts you in Manhattan.

 

[Lyosha]

Just to throw this out there - roni is a student at Cornell, me and Joy go to Baruch, so consider the sources of bias.

I would go with Joy and Andy's advice. If you can, visit (Ithaca and NYC are both vibrant, beautiful cities). If you absolutely cannot, at the very least give the program directors a call and chat, and maybe ask to speak to a couple of students and decide from that.

I'm sure roni could tell you what life in Cornell is like, and Joy and I could tell you what being in Baruch's MFE program is like.

 

[roni]

Just to throw this out there - roni is a student at Cornell, me and Joy go to Baruch, so consider the sources of bias.

I would go with Joy's advice. If you can, visit (Ithaca and NYC are both vibrant, beautiful cities). If you absolutely cannot, at the very least give the program directors a call and chat, and maybe ask to speak to a couple of students.

I'm sure roni could tell you what life in Cornell is like, and Joy and I could tell you what being in Baruch's MFE program is like.

which roni? me ?
lol, I'm not...
He was concerned with the program at Cornell, so just tried to help him.

 

[Lyosha]

my mistake, I could have sworn you mentioned that you either got accepted or are already a student at some point earlier. Where are you a student at, if you don't mind me asking?

 

[roni]

my mistake, I could have sworn you mentioned that you either got accepted or are already a student at some point earlier. Where are you a student at, if you don't mind me asking?

I'm currently applying. Have an interview with Baruch in a couple of days :\

 

[Lyosha]

good luck!

 

[roni]

Thanks

 

[Andy Nguyen]

In case it helps, I made a quick visit to the Cornell NYC office while I was there taking pictures of the CMU NYC program. They share the same building, different floor.
Cornell has a much smaller office which consists of 3, 4 offices for faculty, a reception area, a conference room and a small common room for students to use with table and 5,6 computers. I saw about 3,4 students there. That's their NYC campus.
So don't get too excited about living in NYC. You are not going to have the full campus like Columbia, NYU, Baruch.

The 55 Broad Street building also hosts the classroom for the Poly program with dozens of other small companies. To give you some idea how small Cornell space is, take a look at the CMU MSCF NYC pictures, and imagine Cornell space is slightly bigger than one of the classrooms of CMU. They are expanding their space, last time I was there.

To make up for that, Ithaca campus is really beautiful. You have to be there to appreciate it.

And I hope you read these
http://www.quantnet.com/review-cornell-mfe-program/
http://www.quantnet.com/review-baruch-mfe-program/

 

[Andy Nguyen]

And lastly, when you make a decision, please mark it "Final Destination" in your Tracker. Appreciate it.