Ever heard of Brandeis MAief

congrats on the acceptance... do you mind sharing your stats?

I recommend wustl

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@ bud

thanks for the reply bud. do you mind giving a couple of reasons?

because i currently go there and recruiting here is non existent.

oh shit. well, well. i'm lucky to have bumped into you then. have been getting a lot of emails from brandeis about them wanting me join, being ready to answer any of my questions, etc, etc. just shot an email to them earlier today about job prospects. let's see what they say. so you say it's very bad, huh? you have anything on wustl? or maybe you sided with wustl not because of wustl, but because of not wanting to side with brandeis.

(i'm assuming you meant brandies btw...are you in the MAief?)

Nope i'm a math/econ major here. The econ department is pretty decent, math, not so much. Actually thats an understatement, math sucks here. 0 banks came onto campus this year, yes, 0. No boutiques either. Only a few economic consulting groups such as cornerstone research and a few insurance companies but that's it. The graduate programs could be different but i doubt it. I would specifically ask what companies recruited at Brandeis for econ grad. I would personally go with Wustl, better name and recognition. Brandeis is relatively unknown outside of the northeast.

that sucks man. 0 is nuts. even the decent state schools get some action on campus. what's your plan then? and what year are you anyway?

the graduate business school at brandeis, which houses the maief program, does have stronger recruiting than undergrad (which as budfox said, is basically nonexistent). i won't say that the grad recruiting is quite like a target school, but it does have some action, and the alumni base is extremely helpful.

also, with the new business major, brandeis's business rep is generally on the up-and-up, and it's already known as an outstanding school in general, if not in bus/fin

I'm not a big fan of Brandeis, but it provides a decent education. Career services is god awful. Honestly, I would've probably been better off attending another school around Boston preferably BC, BU, or Northeastern. My friends who went to those schools have some solid finance positions lined up already.

LOL thought i'd share this tidbit but one of my math professors literally took a 10 minute break every class to have a smoke. Fucking hilarious.

islandoffmorocco:

Anyone heard of Brandeis Master of Arts in International Economics and Finance?

I have a big scholarship to this 2 year program. Also have an admission to WUSTL MSF...

Any thought on which is better? Job prospects, etc.

I'd do WUSTL, better school, better program. you may also want to consider doing a masters in finance in europe. with a 750+ gmat you'll be very competitive, even with a lower gpa.

I almost attended Brandeis Maief program myself last year. They offered me a a big scholarship and were really proactive about touching base with me. But thank God, I decided to pay them a visit via open house before making a decision because the job prospects in the program are terrible. Basically no big companies come to recruit. The list of companies that come is quite pathetic, mostly small regional companies, even had the likes of Enterprise on its list of companies. They claim that some students do get jobs at big banks, but done mostly through through alumni connections. So that sounded like a bunch of crap. For some reason, they do have a lot of Chinese international students. Don't confuse the decent reputation Brandeis has for undergrad with its grad programs, especially its business school which is still only developing.

thanks guys for the info, it's very helpful...

@ dublin, that's good to hear...but I guess I have to deal with the rep as it exists today...it seems that OCR is weak...

@ bud, well then i could take my smoke break at the same time. haha but seriously that's f'ed up man. i had a few professors who just didn't give a shit at my UG...one used to bring exams from the wrong class, i mean he twice gave us midterms from a differential equations class that he was teaching without realizing that we were in his advanced linear algebra class. and then he said, both times, "oh well, you should know how to do these anyway..." on the other hand he gave me an A+ so i have no complaints, he had a fuckoff attitude (obviously kept for his research)

@ affirmative...staying clear of europe because it's much harder getting a job (or visa) there than in the US. applied to one decent uni in the pacific rim region though.

@ tentop...dude thanks a lot for this first hand info, very helpful indeed.

tentop what'd you do instead then?

NYU doesn't have an MFE. Are you talking about their Mathematical Finance program from Courant? If you do get in, that would be a no-brainer. NYU is top notch for applied math, and a debatable #1 for Mathematical Finance. It will open so many more doors than WUSTL.

Technically it isn't called Mathematical Finance either haha, it's called a Master of Science in Mathematics in Finance. MFE was an easy way to simplify all that. (Yeah, Courant).

I dunno man. First of all, it's a giant if. IF I do get in, of course I'll be ecstatic and it's most likely that I'll enroll. But I wonder whether it's the right path for me. I will be definitely be pigeonholed into the "quant" niche. (Maybe even a risk management or programmer niche given the scarcity of the more traditional FO quant jobs these days). Not a very bad place to be, true. But after an Actuarial Science undergrad, I'm kinda wary of specializing too much, too early. I have a couple of other worries too.

All this is hypothetical anyway. There's a snowflakes chance in hell I'll get in. I will be well happy if I do though, fingers crossed. I don't think I will be able to say no to NYU, it's too big a name in finance. Their adjunct faculty roster is freaking siccck. Met one a long time ago when I was interning in the derivatives strategy department of a insurance company, and these two fellas from BB had come in to settle the terms of a big OTC contract. He was a global head of XYZ department at BB, gave a really interesting talk (he was demonstrating how by using some lognormal model you could replicate the fit of the heston with jump diffusion that we were using, without the need for any jump process), and was wearing a Vacheron. HAHA.

For full disclosure - I am only peripherally familiar with the models I mentioned, just have a high-level, qualitative understanding.

OK so what about Claremont McKenna? Any idea?

sorry haven't heard of those programs

anyone else heard of mckenna? anyone wanna drop an opinion on claremont mckenna (FOR MSF)?

Yeah. McKenna is to monkeys as grass is to jungles.