University of Chicago - Master in Finance

Program is decent but mostly on your own. I interviewed 30+ firms this cycle (JS, Citadel, DE Shaw, IMC, AQR, SIG, BH etc), and received two offers. I would say the support coming from the program is 35% and the rest is on my own.

Curriculums:

4 required courses (ACCT, Investment, Corp Fin, ML). The ML course is pretty useful and cover basically all you need for QR interviews. It's taught by Dacheng Xiu, literally the best financial ML scholar today.

For electives, you can tailor your classes to fit any track you’re interested in. I'm for quant and all in PhD-level courses in statistics, finance, and OM, all of which are excellent. PhD Courses like Asset Pricing taught by LPH, Probability and stats, Stochastic Optimization, and Convex Optimization are particularly useful for interviews. They also leave some options for PhD, which is great.

Job Placement and support:

Program received $60M in funding from AQR, which provides some preferential opportunities for our students. also internal referrals from top mutual funds and Booth alumni hedge funds. However, beyond these , job support is fairly average. We dont have program career fairs but can only participate in the Uni-wise. Some info and network session though with Seniors from Citadel, GS, KKR, BX, AQR, NorthernTrust but still mostly will not have any meratialized benefits. Most students are on their own for the majority of the job search process.


Peers:

Overall great but with extremely high variance. Many classmates come from like Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Columbia, Uchicago, and with impressive internships at BB Snt, BB QR, BB IBD, Top 3 PE etc. But there are also peers from relatively poor background who struggle to secure interviews and keep up with the coursework, which is common ofc.


Overall:

Booth has a wide alu base and great reputation in HF and mutual funds. That says, if you are good enough and have been trained rigorously during undergrad, you will get plenty of interviews for sure particularly from top HFs and a good chance of landing a position. However, if you are new to quantitative finance and looking to build your skills, I would recommend considering other MFE programs that offer more structured support.