I am a classmate of Eric's, about a year behind him (as a part-time student). I have completed the first year of the UW Computational Finance program and I have about five courses still to go.
I am a distance student. I live in the East Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area, in California. So I have taken all of my courses on-line. My perception is that about 20 percent or so of the students in the program are distance students, generally working professionals. The distance students come from all over the world, including China, Thailand, Texas and the East Coast of the United States. Some of the distance students are working professionals in the Seattle Area as well. The part-time students come from a variety of backgrounds. Some are computer scientists or engineers like me, others work in the financial industry, or areas of banking. Our ages vary as well.
There have been some questions about distance versus class room. I think that if you have the opportunity, taking the classes in the classroom would be better. I miss being able to talk to my professors and the TAs in person. However, the University of Washington Program is pretty unique in their support for working, part-time students. Programs like the UC Berkeley Quant program are very clear that their program cannot be taken part time. Other programs, like the Stanford quant program are oriented toward mathematics and they're pretty clear that those who are not math majors (or something similar) should not apply. As my experience has shown, someone with an engineering background can prosper in the University of Washington program.
A brief digression: I strongly believe that programs like this are the way of the future. This is the direction that University education is headed.
One of the reasons that I miss being able to talk to my professors is that they have all been very fine people. I look forward to someday actually meeting them. They have all been very supportive of their students and they have been very responsive in answering questions. While I certainly don't expect this, I have had professors answer questions posted on the discussion board late at night.
Each class has a discussion board. Instead of sending email to the professor to ask a question students are encouraged to post to the board so that everyone can benefit from the question and answer. The distance students, perhaps of necessity, tend to be very active on this board. The professors and TAs answer questions and post announcements on this board. An associated page has class notes and other course material (and recorded video lectures).
The students in this program are really smart and some of them have deep experience in areas in the financial industry. There has generally been a culture of students helping students that I am very grateful for. There have been times when I have been stuck on a problem and posted a question on the discussion board. Another student has provided the hint that I needed to get past a block and complete the problem successfully.
There have been some questions about the difficulty of the program. As Erik noted, this depends on your background. For me the program has been a challenge. Suffice it to say that I took calculus a long time ago and my statistics background consisted of only basic statistics. My undergrad degree is from UC San Diego, but that was a while ago too. So taking graduate level applied math courses was a shock to my system. At the time, the first course I took, Prof. Zivot's Introduction to Computational Finance, was one of the hardest courses I'd ever taken. However, I found that my hard work paid off. This course was a fantastic foundation for the program and I still go back and reference the class notes.
There has been an effort to provide some introductory classes to fill in some of the background that I had to pick up on my own, so future students with my level of background may have an easier introduction to the program.
I have worked very hard in this program, but I feel that my work has been recognized and rewarded. This is not one of those programs that is dedicated to weeding out students. Your professors want you to succeed and if you work hard, you will.
There have been questions about programming experience. I am biased, since I am a professional software engineer. I don't think that you can succeed as a computational finance professional without programming skills. People are not going to pay you do proofs or do math that someone else implements. You are going to be expected to develop models and implement them. So the focus on programming (in R) is appropriate. Perhaps you will not be building complex software systems in
C++ or Java, but you will be writing code in MatLab or R. The more experience you can get with building software, the better, in my view.
Finally, I have a comment on the job market. We have just gone through one of the worst times in decades in the financial industry. The financial crash in the West has resulted in the layoffs of tens of thousands of financial professionals. Others have lost their jobs when their firms went out of business. The financial industry is also restructuring. Firms like Goldman and JP Morgan can no longer do proprietary trading and they have closed down their proprietary trading groups. For a firm like Goldman, that made a significant amounts of money from proprietary trading, this is a big change. All of these things mean that the job market is not as good now as it once was before 2008. Right now you're probably better off being a software engineer than a quant.
There is one thing that professionals in finance should remember, however. Tomorrow is not like today. Finance is a very dynamic area and it is restructuring itself. While I am fascinated by finance, I would not be in the UW Computational Finance program if I did not believe that there was a brighter future out there in finance. All investments have risk, but I believe that this program is a good investment in both my intellectual future and my professional future.
, one of my friend decide to join this program this fall, so I'd like to ask you a few more questions.
