I just had a look at the UCL course and modules. I personally took Stochastic Methods In Finance and Statistical Inference (3rd year courses..) as a 2nd year student on exchange at UCL last year. Honestly, these courses are not terribly rigorous. Smif skips in many proofs needed to be a quant and I don't expect you to be terribly competitive with other highly ranked quant programs if that is one of the core modules. (then again this is risk management so maybe it is sufficient?) Likewise for inference, proofs were omitted completely because the year previous couldn't handle it. It was shocking to me that proof was omitted from a senior unit.
That is my only experience with the above programs (the UCL course seems to be a smattering of cross departmental courses).
Edit: At UCL most of the third year courses are available as a 'masters alternative'...except they are the same course and there is nothing different from what an undergraduate will. They are CERTAINLY not at a graduate level... Not to sh*t on UCL, but it's really not the place you want to be for hard sciences
I agree. Look at the one course they have on computational finance/
C++:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/maths/courses/...tional/syllabuses-pdfs/financial_pdf_mathgf06
It's grossly inadequate, won't give anyone a competitive advantage.
Not sure
Imperial is that much better.
In the area of quant finance, the best British universities cannot compare to the best American universities. The reasons seem to be as follows:
1) British universities are underfunded and hence under-resourced,
2) There's a long-standing emphasis on theory to the detriment of computation.
3) They try to squeeze too much in to too limited a time frame.
What they're doing essentially is selling their brand name -- Oxford,
Imperial, UCL.
On top of everything, the British visa policy has become crud. You're expected to graduate and then bugger off.
On a lighter note, if you can watch the film
Lucky Sunil, go for it (the "lucky" is meant ironically and chronicles the travails of an Indian student who arrives for his higher education in England):
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0143500/
Inspired by the events from one of the first waves of actors to come to the UK from the Indian sub continent. This Screen Two film follows the young, wide eyed and innocent Sunil.
He has come to London to study Law at university expecting to find an England from the literature he has read and finding a London far from Keats or Kipling.
His university turns out to be a second rate crammer. No university life for Sunil but an external degree institution. He ends up meeting dodgy characters always up to a scam where he tends to be the victim. He meets Balam, a fellow Indian and ends up being involved in dubious dealings with him. Sunil gets an opportunity to do some acting and ends up in a porn set. At the end, Sunil becomes disillusioned and bitter of the England he has found himself in.
Kulvinder Ghir really captures the wide eyed innocence of Sunil and slow unravelling of his love and expectations of the mother country.
