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COMPARE MFin@MIT vs MAFN@Columbia

MFin or MAFN

  • MFin

    Votes: 49 57.0%
  • MAFN

    Votes: 37 43.0%

  • Total voters
    86
Sooo helpful to be in NYC if you are lookin to work in finance in New York. Quant skills will continue to help you as finance continues to get more data intensive. Carnegie Mellon actually does a nice job of helping students find NY roles via its NYC satellite campus.
 
Tough to recruit for NYC if ur in Boston. Sounds like MIT MFins have to get into more details about what classes they take, as not all take a quantitative curriculum. Columbia has a really good alum network in NY Finance.
 
It's Columbia MAFN, not Columbia Financial Engineering or Columbia Business School, two programs that are clearly superior to it. As someone who went to Tandon FRE (a few years ago), I will unequivocally say you do NOT want to a program playing third fiddle at your own school.

IMO, the advantage of being in New York is not nearly enough to compensate for its likely dismal placement rates (which are not made public), and companies and recruiters who would rather hire from other programs on the same campus. If forced to choose between Columbia MAFN or MIT MFin, I pick MIT and it would not even be a decision.
 
Can give some more info on the MFin:

Recruiting to NYC is not really an issue - I've been up there four or five times this semester at various events/interviews. A lot of companies come to campus to interviews (focused on undergrads sure, but we are still eligible to apply).

My coursework is essentially all quantitative, bar one of the core classes this semester (Corporate Finance). Financial Engineering, Financial Data Science, Machine Learning, Probability/Stochastic Models.. and thats just the Course 15 classes. The entire undergraduate curriculum (Course 6 (CS) and Course 18 (Maths)) are open to MFin students too.

We don't all take quantitative, but I would say its over a third if I had to guess - correct that in some interviews you do have to explain your coursework a little bit more.
 
MIT undergrads consistently land jobs in top-tier firms as quant traders/researchers, quant developers, engineers, strats etc, so that doesn't sounds like a negative to me.

they often have math medals which is the main factor and are US citizens (unlike the majority of folks going into these programs)
 
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