Is anyone familiar with Columbia's Operations Research & Financial Engineering program?

Hi,

I am a current college student interested in Columbia's Combined Plan program to get a B.S. in Operations Research. I also know that the major has a concentration in Financial Engineering. Is it very difficult to get into the Financial Engineering concentration? How much GPA do I need to be a good candidate for the concentration? What factors other than GPA are important?

Thank you very much.

 
Best Response

How'd I get a shout-out on this lol. I have a vague familiarity with Columbia's MSOR and MSFE programs, but not undergrad.

Columbia has an awesome financial engineering program, however. Financial engineers from Columbia know their shit, especially when it comes to pricing exotics and doing stochal. I have mad respect for Columbians when it comes to stochal and exotics pricing. When it comes to stochal, they often kick Princeton butt, at least at the graduate ORFE level.

I don't know the details on this or have a good answer, but Andy Nguyen is an expert on all things quant. It is also likely that there's a few Columbians on this site who can help answer your question:

http://www.quantnet.com

I hope you apply to Princeton as well, and you can't mention Princeton without CMU (or Columbia) in the same breath when it comes to quant finance. I also do not want to exclude Wharton, Stanford, Berkeley, UChicago, and NYU.

One last thing for a potential undergrad (because these are four defining years of your life.) Columbia stands on its own merit as a best-of-the-best school, but on a tough day, a misguided part of it wishes it could be Harvard, rather than the gritty, badass Columbia that it is. And that (unfairly) causes it some angst. If you choose Columbia, make sure you have the strength of character to know who you are, and why you want to be there.

 

It's not prestigious in the same way as going to Wharton or something in that people won't routinely discuss its superiority on internet forums...but it's a very solid program, I believe the MSFE is usually one of the top programs in the country. As a Columbian I can tell you first hand that banks and the like definitely do recruit from the IEOR department. Are you specifically talking about the MSFE or the undergrad OR:FE program? The undergrad program can't really be compared to much else since undergrad FE programs are still few and far in between but the program is also solid (shares some of the classes with the grad program) and again banks do pay it attention. Though really, if you're pursuing either of these degrees, you're probably looking for something a bit more mathematical/technical than IBD (at least the students in the programs seem to fit that billing) If you want to know more specifically about any of it, PM me

 

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