Can you tell us a bit about your background?
Cornell Operations Research & Engineering undergrad, went straight to grad school after undergrad, internship experience in Technology at a large investment bank summer before entering the program.
I studied full-time in the program from 8/2008-12/2009
Did you get admitted to other programs?
Did not apply to any others.
Why did you choose this program (over others, if applicable)?
As a Cornell engineering undergrad, I didn't have to take the GRE. I was also able to knock out some of the requirements specific to the Cornell program as an undergraduate. I was able to take other courses instead of Optimization I & II and Monte Carlo Simulation, having already completed them in previous years. Cornell has an amazing faculty and the program is top notch. It also has great career services and (less importantly) has a lot of name recognition.
Tell us about the application process at this program
No problems. Emails and phone calls answered same day usually.
Does this program offer refresher courses for incoming students? How useful was it?
Cornell has recently decided to use C++ and offers a C++ refresher course in the fall in preparation for Monte Carlo Methods for Financial Engineering. They did this after I went through the program though so I don't know the quality. They do have probability and optimization courses offered in the summer that some students used to brush up or get prereqs out of the way.
Tell us about the courses selection in this program. Any special courses you like?
Courses in the business school are very valuable. I liked International Finance and Investment & Portfolio Management. The Intro Derivatives course was good and had some great Harvard Business School risk management case studies on corporate use of derivatives. Also, in the third semester, there were four different electives offered that were very good. My friends also liked the electives they took. Overall there is a huge number of electives you can take, based on your interests.
Tell us about the quality of teaching
Practitioners taught three of the electives in the fall. Someone from JPMorgan and someone from SAC Capital taught an Algorithmic Trading course. Someone from Moody's taught Corporate Credit Analysis. The head of Risk Management at Mizuho Alternative Investments taught a Quantitative Risk Management course. The fourth (Bond Mathematics and MBS) was taught by Dr. Victoria Averbukh who used to head RMBS Strategy at Deutsche.
TAs are very good at helping with homework, especially in the more technical courses. They are ORIE PhD students for the most part, so they know their stochastic calculus and probability top to bottom.
Materials used in the program
Derivatives - Hull
Fixed Income Derivatives - Jarrow
Stochastic Calculus - Shreve
Statistics for Financial Engineering - Ruppert
Quantitative Risk Management - McNeil, Frey, and Embrechts
A lot of the courses used thick course packets prepared by the professor specifically for their course or published copies of the slides for the course before lecture (some printed out copies of the slides for us)
Programming component of the program
R is used a great deal in statistics and time-series classes
MATLAB is used a lot in Monte Carlo and Computational Finance
VBA and Risk were used sparingly in electives
Overall, the programming wasn't very taxing, but it was used regularly. Some classes used no coding, while one class used it in lab every week and regularly on the homework.
Projects
There were a great deal of group projects assigned, which was great. There were several case studies that we did in groups of four or five and presented to business school classes of MBAs and MFEs. There were six to nine classes (including electives) that had several group projects, which I think greatly increased the value of those classes. There were also individual projects assigned along the way. The degree project that was sponsored by various firms (two by Goldman, one by Deutsche, one by Barclays, one by Bloomberg, and one by the Cornell Endowment) is a semester long project completed in your final semester that involves working in a team of four to six people to solve a real world problem presented by the sponsor using financial engineering concepts.
Career service
Cornell career services is great. A large number of companies interview on campus for both internships and full-time. Those looking for full-time opportunities can use on-campus recruiting but must take a bus to Ithaca from Manhattan in the third semester to do the interviews. This wasn't a big deal and people would sometimes rent a car and drive up together. A lot of the internships were obtained by going through career services. In addition, the Operations Research department is always sending out job postings for people looking for OR people, FE people, and other things that individual professors get from former students or headhunters.
Can you comment on the social interaction between students of different ethnics, nationalities in the program?
The group is very international, but other than some (but far from all) of the Chinese students forming their own group, people interacted and were friends with all the ethnicities. There was just that group of 4 or 5 that didn't associate with others very much. There were many Chinese students who were part of the majority of people who interacted with each other though.
What do you like about the program?
Great exposure to employers. The material covered is solid FE stuff. The professors are very well regarded and some come from practitioner backgrounds.
What DON’T you like about the program?
Stochastic Calculus and Credit Risk was a bit too theoretical. The stuff we learned would be useful if we were PhDs doing quant research, but for MFEs, it was interesting, but nothing we would be able to implement. That being said, the models aren't used that much from what I have seen and the professor introduces them by explaining the model and then explaining the shortcomings of the model, so perhaps they were just using the models as a vehicle to teach Stoch Calc II and Credit Risk concepts.
Suggestions for the program to make it better
Be more involved with checking on how students are doing. Our director did not know much about people's offers until the end of the semester when we did exit interviews. I think others brought it up as an issue and should be corrected in the future.
What are your current job status? What are you looking for?
Analyst in Trading at one of GS/MS/BarCap/JPM. Would prefer not to say which.
Other comments
MFE programs can be very valuable if you have a reason for doing it and know what you want to get from it. Don't just do an MFE or other quantitative finance graduate program because you want a job in finance. Make sure you have a specific plan for how you are going to accomplish it.
That being said, be willing to change the plan around because you often are dealt different cards than you would like in life.
