The best second tier MFE universities

[snehal]

Hey everyone,

I am planning to apply to about 11-12 universities in US.. Though I am very much aware of the facilities, curriculum, faculty, fees, placement records of the top tier schools I have
observed that below mentioned schools have not been discussed at length., Despite they being not lagging far behind the top ones.

1. Kent state
2.Illinois (UIUC)
3.Boston university
4.Georgia Institute of Technology

I would like to know how these schools would be ranked on the basis of their placement records, internships, faculty and the facilities available on campus.

 

[Sanket Patel]

I don't think Boston University deserves to be in a list of second tier universities; third tier is probably more fitting.


If you want to find out more about the BU program, make your way over to Global Derivatives.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

The problem with judging these programs is the lack of information on the important issue such as placement, internship, etc. You know as much about them as there is info on their website. The programs you mentioned not being in/near financial centers do not help the issue.

 

[atreides]

I am just curious why you woul be applying to 11-12 schools for MFE. If it were for an MBA, I would understand as I have heard of numerous accounts of some prospects applying to at least 10 programs. If you have a good enough profile to apply to the top tier schools, applying to second / third tier will be like giving away the application fee money for nothing. I'm sure those schools will be all willing to accept the money.

Good luck with your efforts, but if you get into all 12 schools, you will probably end up going to just one

 

[IlyaKEightSix]

How about instead of a second tier MFE program, you get a first tier OR program?

MFE-finance BS=operations research. Programming, structuring/solving problems, optimization/statistics/stochastics...

This is all operations research stuff.

 

[Sanket Patel]

Umm...not really.

How about instead of a second tier MFE program, you get a first tier OR program?

MFE-finance BS=operations research. Programming, structuring/solving problems, optimization/statistics/stochastics...

This is all operations research stuff.

 

[GoIllini]

I'm an engineering graduate of UIUC so I'm a little biased, but my impression is that the school has an excellent engineering program in general; most of their degrees beat the Ivy League and some even rank higher than schools like MIT and Stanford (Materials Science, Environmental Engineering, Ag. Eng). Downstate IL is also known for having a very low cost of living. UIUC is also known for relatively strong econ, finance, and math programs that typically make it into the top 15 or 20.

If you want to work in Chicago or the Midwest and you do well, the program will make you competitive with students from first-tier schools. Once you get past Columbus, OH or Omaha, NE, though, the university loses brand-name status and becomes just another respectable flagship state school.

Placements from UIUC into financial firms would first read like a list of prop shops and hedge funds that operate mostly on the CBOT and CME. Along with that, you've got a number of insurance firms like AON, Allstate, and Northwestern Mutual. The Big Four consulting firms also recruit here. BP-Amoco, the largest commodities trader in the world, also has its trading headquarters in Chicago and recruits heavily from UIUC. You also have Northern Trust, RW Baird, and a few other investment-bank-like companies recruiting, including a number of boutique shops. A small fraction (maybe 5%) of graduates will wind up on Wall Street- both Citigroup and Goldman Sachs consider UIUC a semi-target school. I'd like to think a larger percentage (maybe 20%) of students could get offers from these banks if they really wanted to; many students who choose to go to UIUC are less interested in working on Wall Street and more interested in LaSalle Street.

Chicago prop-shops are not usually as glamorous (or pretentious, depending on your perspective) as the east-coast hedge funds or investment banks; many of them try to avoid attracting attention to themselves in case someone decides to copy their strategy. My understanding, however, is that they tend to quietly pay just as well as their New York counterparts, if not better. If I got an offer from a supposedly no-name firm like Jump Trading, Wolf Trading, or Rosenthal-Collins Group, I would think long and hard before I turned it down in favor of a bulge-bracket New York investment bank. Chicago is known for paying more for performance than New York, and a number of traders and quants have retired after just five or six years of work there. My understanding is that the Chicago prop shops also have more of a sink-or-swim mentality than even the investment banks and hedge funds in New York, so there's a trade-off.

I would imagine that a majority of the financial engineers who graduate from UIUC, just by virtue of the fact that Chicago's financial community revolves around the exchanges, will be working with standardized exchange-traded products. If you enjoy finding correlations between different financial instruments and coming up with trading strategies, it may be easier to get those kinds of work opportunities out of UIUC than a comparable second-tier east-coast or west-coast school. If you like structured products and exotics or if you want to work in research at an investment bank, you may find more opportunities if you graduate from a school on the east coast (like Baruch, BU, or GT.)

My professional background is more of a financial programmer at a New York investment bank, though, so I'd defer to assessments from folks who work as financial engineers in Chicago. My experience simply comes from the fact that I have a number of friends who work for Chicago financial firms and the fact that I applied at a number before taking an offer from New York.

 

[IlyaKEightSix]

Hey GoI, how's UIUC's operations research program?

 

[snehal]

hey every1 wat abt placement rate of UIUC, is it like above 80% or so? I hv heard UIUC admits lot of students..around 130...so are most of them well placed?

 

[GoIllini]

Hey GoI, how's UIUC's operations research program?

I'm not sure if UIUC puts the same emphasis on O/R as other financial engineering programs do. Like any Midwestern rust-belt university, we have a top-notch industrial engineering program, which I believe is going to be related in a number of ways. However, it's a separate program.

hey every1 wat abt placement rate of UIUC, is it like above 80% or so? I hv heard UIUC admits lot of students..around 130...so are most of them well placed?

The college of engineering tends to have a placement rate comparable with and sometimes exceeding their Ivy League counterparts in traditional engineering programs, although they tend to have a lower average starting salary, for what it's worth. In the government world, graduates are routinely recruited to work at Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, Fermilab, NSA, CIA, and State Department. In industry, we get everyone from Google to IBM to Microsoft to a plethora of fortune-500 companies and a number of hedge funds to recruit programmers.

That said, UIUC's business program- outside of Accounting and Actuarial Science- tends to have a different placement profile than engineering. The business program's placement profile looks more like that of a stronger Big-Ten school (like Wisconsin, Perdue, or Michigan) than an Ivy League. That means a typical undergraduate finance placement rate would look more like 95% in a median year, but your average first year compensation would look more like $60K than $100K.

The financial engineering program is relatively young at UIUC and it was in its infancy when I was a student there. I'm not sure if its recruiting profile will look more like our engineering program's or our business program's. Either way, Illinois has a solid business school and an engineering school that either beats the Ivy League programs or at least is on par with them.

With all the talk I'm doing of UIUC's engineering program, I'd be remiss to leave out Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech does extremely well against the Ivy Leagues in engineering and has jumped four or five places in the rankings over the past four or five years. You find that a lot of state schools compete very well against the Ivy Leagues in engineering and the hard sciences. As the field matures, we'll see just how applicable that is to financial engineering.

 

[snehal]

thank you very much for the information GoIllini..