Toronto MathFin UofT MMF Students
- Thread starter Dibbs
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To be honest I don't think I want to go to the MMF program. Honestly, I did not get a good vibe from the interview.
Everything seemed so cheap and unorganized.
I'm pretty sure you will hear from them at some point. As I said the admission process is not very organized.
Even the interview email was short notice. I only received the email the last week thurday at about 5pm and even that email had to address or details about the location of the interview. I responded to the email but did not get a reply until Monday.
At 12:15pm Monday afternoon I got a response and details about where to go. That was less than 2hrs before the scheduled interview time !!!! If that is not disorganized then I don't know what it.
If you got other offers then forget about the interview. If not then maybe you should go, in case to don't get any other offers.
woow, congrats!! MIT is a good choice.
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I don't even think about it. Go to MIT!
Moving from wall street to bay is much easier than the converse.
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Just got waitlisted by Columbia today, I guess I have to go to the interview.
Hi there! thanks a lot for the information of the interview. I am also an applicant of ut-mmf. Actually I have two questions.
1. as you mentioned, there are 20 minutes for reading and presenting. if there are 5 interviewees, then each of them will only get 5 mins to do the presentation?
2. i am worry about the random math topics....it seems that I have no idea about every topics you mentioned....how does that part works? did they ask you directly about the topics, or they gave you some information about the topic, say an article?
Appreciate for your helps!!!
Hey vilovestar, which program in Columbia r u applying for? MAFN? Did they send out decision yet?
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Hey Jondan, do you mind to share your background for us?
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I got so confused with these two parts as well. Hi, Dismantler, can you please explain those two parts again? really appreciate that
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MSFE, I am thinking about apply for MAFN as well....
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Did you apply elsewhere?
You might still get in. Someone might opt no to go because they get a better offer.
I got so confused with these two parts as well. Hi, Dismantler, can you please explain those two parts again? really appreciate that
1. You will be split into groups depending on how many people are there. For example, if there are 5 people you will be split into two groups of 2 and 3 people. You will read the articles for about 10mins then one of the groups will be called on to present what they read and then the next group. Makes sense?
2. The random math topic thing is just a way for the person interviewing to guage the knowledge of the people he is interviewing. For example, they might ask what brownian motion is. This kind of question basically test if you know anything about stochastic processes.
You may not know the answer to every single question because you may not have seen it before but do your best to answer it. For example, if you are asked what a measure is you might not know if you haven't take any course that has to do with measure theory. But perhaps you have seen measure used in analysis or probabilty.
Another example, some courses in probability talk about sigma algebras and measures. However, in my probability course in engineering we didn't talk about sigma algerbras or measures, however, in my analysis class we touched on it. So what I am trying to get at here is that you might not know the specific word the interviewer uses but try to answer the question to the best of your ability or ask for clarification.
I've just got an e-mail from the MMF to have my assessment next Wednesday (March, 7th).
Dismantler, would you mind sharing the contents of the basic math part? I am finishing my PhD, and I have to refresh my undergraduate knowledge before the interview (for the last couple of years, I worked on very specific topics and now have to refresh some of the stuff for the interview). So it would be really helpful if you could tell us the topics they covered, and the type of the questions.
For example, do they want you to solve a given differential equation? Or do they want you to give definitions, general methods, etc? Were there any brainteasers?
In addition, you said that they gave you an article and wanted you to present it. How was the article: did it have a lot of terminology, or was it an article that we might see, for example, in Economist. Did they ask any questions after presenting it?
Thank you in advance.
Dismantler, would you mind sharing the contents of the basic math part? I am finishing my PhD, and I have to refresh my undergraduate knowledge before the interview (for the last couple of years, I worked on very specific topics and now have to refresh some of the stuff for the interview). So it would be really helpful if you could tell us the topics they covered, and the type of the questions.
For example, do they want you to solve a given differential equation? Or do they want you to give definitions, general methods, etc? Were there any brainteasers?
In addition, you said that they gave you an article and wanted you to present it. How was the article: did it have a lot of terminology, or was it an article that we might see, for example, in Economist. Did they ask any questions after presenting it?
Thank you in advance.
are you from Toronto ? Because I lived in BC and didn't get any email.
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The test is very basic. By basic, I mean things like simple integration, inverse of a matrix, definitions of a financial term (non mathematical), elementary probability theory, super basic questions on ODE... etc.
There is probably going to be a brain teaser which is very general and has multiple solutions. I believe they are setup to find out how you think.
Hi Dismantler, thanks for sharing!
For the article, is it like a business or finance article from the newspaper? How long is it? How much time do you have to present? You said that people are divided into groups, does that mean two or more people are presenting the same article or everyone is presenting his/her own? Do they ask you to talk what you think about the article?
For the random Math topics in the group interview, do they specify an order for you to answer the question? Or whoever wants to talk about it can go ahead and talk? Either way, it doesn't seem very fair to me...
Are there breaks in between each session? How many people were there in your group and how long did it take?
Thank you so much!!!
Hi viv_d,
I had the interview today. The exam part wasn't that hard, it was very similar what Dismantler explained. Though, mine had a statistics question and no probability, so it seems that they change it for every evaluation. They gave 10 questions and 45 minutes for it, I did not have enough time to solve one of the questions, but that was mainly because I wrote as a scrap first and then tried to rewrite them in a cleaner way.
The interview part was quite relaxed, but you cannot tell from their faces what they think about what you say, lol. The article my group had (me and another applicant) was from The Economist, it had some terminology in it but was not that difficult to understand. You are expected to read it, discuss it with your teammate a little, and arrange a way of summarizing it in turns (you have 10 minutes for these). No questions were asked about them.
Then we had the more high level math concepts such as Brownian motion, measure theory, etc. They asked almost the same questions that Dismantler told us about, but I had the impression that if you do not know much about them, it is not a huge deal.
Hope this helps
Hi viv_d,
I had the interview today. The exam part wasn't that hard, it was very similar what Dismantler explained. Though, mine had a statistics question and no probability, so it seems that they change it for every evaluation. They gave 10 questions and 45 minutes for it, I did not have enough time to solve one of the questions, but that was mainly because I wrote as a scrap first and then tried to rewrite them in a cleaner way.
The interview part was quite relaxed, but you cannot tell from their faces what they think about what you say, lol. The article my group had (me and another applicant) was from The Economist, it had some terminology in it but was not that difficult to understand. You are expected to read it, discuss it with your teammate a little, and arrange a way of summarizing it in turns (you have 10 minutes for these). No questions were asked about them.
Then we had the more high level math concepts such as Brownian motion, measure theory, etc. They asked almost the same questions that Dismantler told us about, but I had the impression that if you do not know much about them, it is not a huge deal.
Hope this helps
harpik, thank you so much for sharing!
How many students were there in your group interview? How long did the whole thing last?
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