I've managed to talk to a few students who will be graduating in 12/2025, and I've also interacted on several occasions with the admissions committee.
I'm primarily applying to this course because:
1. I'm open to working in AM, and it has a much better program than the other alternative for Asset Management (Yale)
2. Freedom to structure your course in a pretty liberal way, you can load up on ML/AI courses which help me move towards Macro QR
3. Great faculty and brand name
4. Since it is a new program with a near perfect mean GRE Quant score, I have a feeling that the career services in Booth are going to be working hard to help place candidates in their desired role
A small instance which stuck to me was this instance of a few candidates looking to explore IBD recruitments, the school took the feedback seriously and moved to introduce a new early admissions deadline to accomodate the relatively early recruitment cycle for IBD. The fact that change was quickly implemented makes me feel a little confident in how adaptive and receptive the course is to feedback (I'm looking at you, UC Berkley), and it could be a good program and I'm slightly bullish on the performance of the class in these cohorts.
The only weakness I feel this course may have relative to MIT is the absence of project labs (which, funnily enough, are available to UChic MSFM students). When I enquired about any plans to introduce project labs in the near future by the management, they'd said that it may not happen anytime soon. It could be because they're still trying to find their footing being a relatively new program, but I think this was the only drawback of this program in my opinion.
If anyone feels otherwise or thinks differently, I'm happy to discuss!
