Planned Courses

[another]

Hi I have a question regarding the planned courses section of the application. If I decide not to take some of the courses, what influence will it have on the offer/application?

 

[RowYourBoat]

Do you mean that on your MFE application it is asking what courses you plan to take? It probably will not influence your application. I assume they use it to gauge interest or as a survey to plan logistics when they organize their classes.

 

[Onegin]

- "planned" courses are weighted substantially less than "completed" courses
- some schools do conditional offers, where acceptance is conditional on completing a course or sequence of courses with a specific grade.
- assuming your planned courses aren't part of a conditional offer, you should be fine from the perspective of the school

however, this shit is really hard. At least for me. I wish I would have done a solid course in algorithms, another in basic probability, and even more programming than I had going in. Consider that recruiting starts in August, when you still haven't learned anything from the program. So you might still be able to get into the program w/ less classes, it's not clear you will be able to get out of the program w/ less classes. Probably you're smarter than me (not a high bar), but just a heads up.

 

[Andy Zhang]

however, this shit is really hard. At least for me. I wish I would have done a solid course in algorithms, another in basic probability, and even more programming than I had going in. Consider that recruiting starts in August, when you still haven't learned anything from the program. So you might still be able to get into the program w/ less classes, it's not clear you will be able to get out of the program w/ less classes. Probably you're smarter than me (not a high bar), but just a heads up.

Amen to that!

Having a good foundation in algorithms (and data structures) is so important--one that I still lack (fml)... Literally every coding test I've had always had some dynamic programming question. I would say that a solid course in stochastic processes (basically more advanced probability) is also super helpful. There are problems that are solvable using iterated expectations but using Markov chains instead significantly simplifies things, especially when you're under time stress in an interview. For programming, from my own experience before entering industry, I thought I was pretty damn good...but then I saw some of my co-workers' production-level code and realized how shitty I was. Some onsite interviews will even do coding reviews--not fun if you're not a really good coder.

Bottom line is: even if *something* is not mandatory, if it isn't costly to do, then do it. Your future self will thank you for it when you go into interviews, your interviewer tries to grill the shit out of you, and you nail it with flying colors.