HELP ME PLEASE ----Masters in Finance

Hey everyone.. I've been doing some research on grad school. I went to tier 2 target (Duke, Notre Dame type) school for my undergrad... I am looking to go to grad school

Cornell- for Fin Eng.
Columbia- Op Research
Columbia- Financial Mathematics
MIT- MA in Fin
Carnegie M - MAsters in computational Finance

Can anyone Rate these programs 1-5? I'm looking for the best in terms of alumni strength in New York as well as job placement.

PLEASE HELP..

3 Comments
 
Best Response

I hate to sound like a broken record of Princeton promotion, but you may also want to put Princeton and perhaps also Stanford on your list. Actually, my class has two Duke alumns and the class behind me has a student from Notre Dame, so you might be a good fit here.

QuantNet has an MFE program ranking that might be a good place to start:

https://quantnet.com/mfe-programs-rankings/

In terms of actual recruiting, a lot of sell-side banks make decisions based on effective selectivity (I actually have a document from a now-defunct bank's recruiting manual that states this in writing). I don't know this year's numbers off the top of my head, but the typical admissions rate at Princeton is 4-5%, MIT is 7%, and CMU MSCF and Columbia MSFE are probably around 10%, maybe 15%. Columbia MSFM takes most people with a full-time job at a bank, and Columbia's MSOR program would probably be somewhere in-between. Columbia often tends to redirect good MSFE candidates who don't quite make the cut to their MSOR program.

If you're not going for a sell-side job where prestige matters, all of these schools will give you access to the buy side recruiting circuit. DE Shaw, Citadel, AQR, Getco, Jump all recruit at these schools. And once you get in front of a recruiter, all that matters is your technical/quantitative ability.

These are all high quality programs that are worth the tuition dollars.

WSO is a great site, but you may also want to ask QuantNet.com. This is really their forte.

IlliniProgrammer's drive-by ranking of these choices:

IF YOU WANT TO BE A QUANT:

CMU Columbia MSFE Cornell MIT Columbia MSOR Columbia MSFM

IF YOU WANT TO BE A BANKER MIT Columbia MSFE Cornell CMU Columbia MSOR Columbia MSFM

 

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