COMPARE Master Programs Comparison: Which quant program to choose?

Please allow me to be frank.
Stop all the nonsense talk about being 25-26-27 and too old. It's naive, annoying. I got my first job at 31. Other people I know start the MFE program at much older age.
If you want to work when you are young, don't go to school.
If you join a program, 1 or 2 years is what you have to spend. No other choice.
Nobody will hire you at 18 if you have no desirable skillset.
Everybody will fight to hire you at 60 if you have skillset market wants

It's never about age. It's about how can you make money for the employers.
 
Lolasff said:
Thanks to all of you for your encouragements!!!

Don't you think that it's a bit late to start working at the age of 27. I'm 24 today. If I go to Princeton (2 year program), I won't start working before the age of 26/27.
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So that you know I started working at age 26. That's when I finished my BS. I was trying to leave Cuba before that so don't worry. There's plenty of time in front of you.
 
Princeton MFIN is definitely the better option. Since the issue of Columbia OR is being discussed here also, I would like to bring up my own situation in if you all don't mind.

I also have a Columbia MSOR admit and I would definitely prefer an FE admit from a good school like Princeton. Unfortunately for me, my FE admits are from the so called 'second grade schools' like IIT chicago, Rutgers, NCSU. Given this situation I am highly inclined to take up the Columbia admit.

I have studied the course structure and syllabus carefully everywhere and I won't be missing out on that much from the knowledge point of view in Columbia MSOR. However, placement priority will definitely be given to FE students as far as good finance jobs are concerned. And as Andy said, I will be one of the few hundred graduates Columbia mass produces every year(seriously the OR class size is huge and they have around 75 MSFE's too!).

What I want to ask you all is that as far as perception on the street, placements n career services is concerned, would it be better to be one of the many Columbia graduates or to graduate from a lower quality program. ( Certainly the question doesn't arise if I had an admit from a school like Princeton.) Will Columbia's location and name offset the trade-off of doing an OR degree rather than an MSFE degree.

I have read a lot about this OR/FE matter on the various threads. As Alain said, they rightly push someone in lolasff's boots to go to princeton rather than Columbia OR, but they don't really push me any real direction. I would really appreciate your comments on this.
 
Just out of curiosity, arent there also jobs in CA for those that graduate from that program at USC. I mean not everyone will want work on work street. And it is quite natural to go to a 2nd tier school if someone cant make it to the top notch ones like NYU and of course Baruch.
 
alain said:
Yuriy, you might be thinking about Boston College. I don't recall any Boston University sports team... maybe hockey?
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Boston U has a good hockey team, though I'm not sure how good they are this year. Boston College has great ice hockey (Frozen Four again this year), good football and usually decent basketball. My freshman year they beat #1 Notre Dame on the last game of the season, made it to the Sweet 16, and won the Beanpot.
 
perrewperrew said:
Just out of curiosity, arent there also jobs in CA for those that graduate from that program at USC. I mean not everyone will want work on work street. And it is quite natural to go to a 2nd tier school if someone cant make it to the top notch ones like NYU and of course Baruch.
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I think if your goal is working somewhere other than Wall St, or a Wall St-type firm, then you'll do just fine going to any decent program. After all, its the knowledge you crave. Though, I'd find it a bit strange for someone to study financial engineering yet have no interest in working at a Wall St-type firm.

I'm sure there are opportunities in CA. Obviously, though, you have better odds of landing a high-paying job in NY or London. Well, at least you did...
 
Lolasff said:
Don't you think that it's a bit late to start working at the age of 27. I'm 24 today. If I go to Princeton (2 year program), I won't start working before the age of 26/27.
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I do not see any problem with this except that you will need to figure out where to get money (for living expences like home, food, clothing) for 2 years vs. 1 year.

Also, Fin and OR are kind of far from each other except for those areas of finance that use OR. I'm not familiar with OR at Columbia but you will most likely need to take courses in Supply Chain Management, Network Flows/Network Design, Logistics, Integer/Linear/Nonlinear/Dynamic Programming.

Ask yourself whether you would enjoy OR; it has some courses that not everyone will like. I consider myself partially connected to OR, but I do not picture myself taking Supply Chain Management or Logistics courses. It might turn out that half way through the program you will realize that you can't stand spending all your time figuring out how to get as much goods as possible from point A to point B spending the least amount of time and money.
 
Reading this thread, I have came up with a question :)

Given that you were accepted to 2 equally weighted schools (in terms of everything you care about) but one school has a great Football team and the other does not. Would that really matter to you? :) Would you go to the one with a Football team?
 
If I had to make that choice, I would probably go to the school with the football team. But if that football team happened to be a rival or a part of the same conference as my alma mater, I would pick the other school.

If I had to pick between BU and BC, cēterīs paribus, I would without a doubt pick BU. I'm currently at FSU and BC is in the same conference as FSU. In recent years, BC has become somewhat of a rival - especially last season when we dashed their hopes for a run at the national championship. :D
 
perrewperrew said:
Just out of curiosity, arent there also jobs in CA for those that graduate from that program at USC. I mean not everyone will want work on work street. And it is quite natural to go to a 2nd tier school if someone cant make it to the top notch ones like NYU and of course Baruch.
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There are jobs in CA in asset management firms, hedgies and a few local branches of IB (DB has its CA branch there). The problem is that most of these firms are not very well known and it's very difficult to find out about their job postings.
Just take a look at the firms that employ USC graduates http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/CAMS/MF/#stu
there are plenty of local firms. If you don't want to work on Wall Street, then it fits the bill nicely.

On the other hands, one has to wonder about the job opportunities in CA when majority of UCB MFE graduates go to NYC for their internships and jobs.
Now with UCLA starting a new MFE program, what once a small market becomes a smaller job market.
 
Sanket Patel said:
If I had to make that choice, I would probably go to the school with the football team. But if that football team happened to be a rival or a part of the same conference as my alma mater, I would pick the other school.
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Does that mean you would never go to UF? :) I've heard that people take UF vs. FSU rivalry very serious :)
 
UF? UF? UF??? Yes, the rivalry is quite intense to say the least. It's probably one of the biggest rivalries college football. To answer your question, I would never attend UF, let alone set foot on that campus. I dislike UF even more than I do the Yankees.:D
 
Who cares about FSU or UF? One is in Tallahassee and the other one is in Gainsville... have you ever heard from any of those places? Thank you :D

LET'S GO HAWKEYES!!!
 
By the way, CVaR has been studied extensively at UF and many many papers have been published by UF faculty on the subject.

Also, the Abel's Prize, which is very similar to Nobel Prize but in Math was awardet to UF Math professor John Griggs Thompson.

Laureates 2008

So Gainesville is not entirely on the other end of the planet :)
 
Well actually in Columbia , you can completely avoid the Supply Chain Management, Network Flows/Network Design, Logistics courses in your OR masters study. The offer a wide range of electives in finance itself which you can take, some of which have been stated as reserved for FE students. But courses like Introduction To Financial Engineering, Applied Financial Engineering, Quantitative Risk Management, Applications Programming for FE, are not one amongst those reserved for FE students, and they can very well be included in your study.

Problem is, the OR class size is big and getting those courses could be a problem. Besides some of the good FE courses like Monte Carlo simulation, Financial Engineering: Discrete-Time Asset Pricing , Financial Engineering: Continuous-Time Asset Pricing will be out of your reach.

So Princeton would be a better option for you, lolasff. But you all haven't answered my question yet.:sos:.
Should I start a new thread about it, I think there are many who are in the same boat as me.
 
Prateek Bhatia said:
What I want to ask you all is that as far as perception on the street, placements n career services is concerned, would it be better to be one of the many Columbia graduates or to graduate from a lower quality program. ( Certainly the question doesn't arise if I had an admit from a school like Princeton.) Will Columbia's location and name offset the trade-off of doing an OR degree rather than an MSFE degree.
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It really depends on how lower is lower. Some programs may be ranked lower (in whatever way we rank them) but give you as much knowledge as Columbia, but others may be ranked lower and give you much less knowledge so you will never make it past the 1st interview. We should not forget that besides having their name on the resume, those highly ranked schools give you suffiicient knowledge to pass difficult interviews.

If I had to choose between, say, Polytech's FE and Columbia OR, I would definitely choose Columbia. Yes, it is not FE, but not all jobs specifically ask for a degree in FE, many just say "quantitative degree". On the other hand, many jobs ask for a degree from a top 10 program.
 
It is also a bit hard to believe that many of the courses are avoidable in Columbia's OR. It is a degree in OR in the end :)
 
please every body forget football and concentrate on MF..i m seriously duoble minded..is there any 1 out there who can remove my confusion????? :sos:
 
Yuriy said:
By the way, CVaR has been studied extensively at UF and many many papers have been published by UF faculty on the subject.

Also, the Abel's Prize, which is very similar to Nobel Prize but in Math was awardet to UF Math professor John Griggs Thompson.

Laureates 2008

So Gainesville is not entirely on the other end of the planet :)
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Gainesville is still far away from "civilization"... like Ithaca, NY :D
 

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