Undergraduate Programs for Financial Engineering

Hi Monkeys,

I’m currently approaching my senior year of high-school, and have to decide on course and university options that I wish to apply to in the fall. As a programmer that has a love for finance and math, I’m particularly interested in financial engineering. However, I’m having trouble deciding what programs and universities I should apply for, as I have heard that BFE’s are not especially desired due to them specializing too early. I feel like a dual Mathematics and Computer Science major would pretty much be the safest route.

What I’d like to know is for the route of financial engineering, does your almamdtter matter as much as for IB? Of course, I have no idea what I’ll actually end up doing and may decide FE isn’t for me, but as of now that’s the path I wish to pursue and I hope I’m not shooting myself in the foot by going to a non target if I decide I wish to go into another aspect of finance in the future.

Side note, I attend an international traveling school (an explanation is not particularly relevant), and have been weighing my options for international schools. Is it wise to stick with more well known US Schools, rather than international ones (besides the obvious Cambridge/Oxford/LSE)?

Thanks!

3 Comments
 

if you want to do FE, I think Math OR CS with adequate programming preparation and Linear Algebra / possibly DiffEq is fine. However, if you already have that interest, it will definitely help to double-dip a BBA/BSBA (Finance/Econ) or quantitatively-geared econ degree. Otherwise you'll be stuck as a regular modified programmer in Financial Industry without knowledge of Business

 
Best Response
whattherock

if you want to do FE, I think Math OR CS with adequate programming preparation and Linear Algebra / possibly DiffEq is fine. However, if you already have that interest, it will definitely help to double-dip a BBA/BSBA (Finance/Econ) or quantitatively-geared econ degree. Otherwise you'll be stuck as a regular modified programmer in Financial Industry without knowledge of Business

Thanks! Yeah, one thing I'm fearful of is being too pushed into CS and not finance/ math. I'm currently working on a senior thesis involving financial modeling and applications in R for cryptocurrencies, so I'm hoping to explore a little bit more which areas actually interest me the most before next year.

 

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