Structuring Curriculum to Prepare for a Career in Finance/Business
Hello all! I want to take courses that are potentially helpful for a career in finance, so I'm hoping you all can provide some helpful feedback on these courses listed below as well as any other preparation that would be helpful.
What do you think of the following? Can you suggest any other topics/materials that would be very helpful?
ECON 135: Finance for Non-MBAs (MS&E 245G)
For graduate students and advanced undergraduates. The foundations of finance; applications in corporate finance and investment management. Financial decisions made by corporate managers and investors with focus on process valuation. Topics include criteria for investment decisions, valuation of financial assets and liabilities, relationships between risk and return, market efficiency, and the valuation of derivative securities. Corporate financial instruments including debt, equity, and convertible securities. Equivalent to core MBA finance course, FINANCE 220. Prerequisites: ECON 50, ECON 102A, or equivalents; ability to use spreadsheets, and basic probability and statistics concepts including random variables, expected value, variance, covariance, and simple estimation and regression.
MS&E 245A: Investment Science
Formerly MS&E 242. Introduction to the basic concepts of modern quantitative finance and investments. Focus is on basic principles and how they are applied in practice. Topics: basic interest rates; evaluating investments: present value and internal rate of return; fixed-income markets: bonds, yield, duration, portfolio immunization; term structure of interest rates; measuring risk: volatility and value at risk; designing optimal security portfolios; the capital asset pricing model. Group projects involving financial market data. No prior knowledge of finance required. Appropriate for engineering or science students wishing to apply their quantitative skills to develop a basic understanding of financial modeling and markets. Prerequisite: basic preparation in probability, statistics, and optimization.
MS&E 245B Advanced Investment Science
Formerly MS&E 342. Topics: forwards and futures contracts, continuous and discrete time models of stock price behavior, geometric Brownian motion, Ito's lemma, basic options theory, Black-Scholes equation, advanced options techniques, models and applications of stochastic interest rate processes, and optimal portfolio growth. Computational issues and general theory. Teams work on independent projects. Prerequisite: 245A.
MS&E 246: Financial Risk Analytics
Practical introduction to financial risk analytics, focusing on data-driven modeling, computation, and statistical estimation of credit and market risks. Case studies based on real data will be emphasized. Topics include mortgage risk, asset-backed securities, commercial lending, consumer delinquencies, crowd funding, transactions analytics, derivatives risk. Tools from machine learning and statistics will be developed. Data sources will be discussed. Intended to enable students to design and implement risk analytics tools in practice. Prerequisite: 245A or similar, some background in probability and statistics, working knowledge of R, Matlab, or similar computational/statistical package.
MS&E 146: Corporate Financial Management
Key functions of finance in both large and small companies, and the core concepts and key analytic tools that provide their foundation. Making financing decisions, evaluating investments, and managing cashflow, profitability and risk. Designing performance metrics to effectively measure and align the activities of functional groups and individuals within the firm. Structuring relationships with key customers, partners and suppliers. Prerequisite: 145, 245A, 245G or equivalent.
