High School Senior interested in Financial Engineering

[Joseph]

Hello,

I'm a high school senior in Seattle, WA, really interested in math and financial engineering. As far as I know, only Princeton offers an undergraduate degree, with their ORFE department, and, though I have good grades, it's rather difficult to get in. I was wondering what advice current financial engineers have for someone my age. I was thinking of chemical engineering as an undergrad, with an emphasis on math as I already have 2 years of college math under my belt, or possibly systems science and math if I go to Wash U or something similar. Also, there aren't any FE's in Seattle, so I would also like to know what life is like for a financial engineer, what kind of jobs do you have and what is life like? I have lived on the East coast for most of my life, so moving from Seattle is not an issue, but I know no one in the industry.

Thanks for your help, and feel free to e-mail me if you're feeling generous!

Joseph

 

[Andy Nguyen]

There are at least two undergrad FE programs in the east coast, JMU and Stevens
Stevens launches undergraduate Quantitative Finance program - QuantNetwork - Financial Engineering Forum

 

[CGiuliano]

I started off in chemical engineering and then switched to math .

FE is not OR. You can find introductory info -on this site- if you want to dig a bit deeper.

And yeah, Andy beat me to the point.

 

[Joseph]

Thanks!

Wow these forums are great! Thank you for the info on Stevens and JMU, I will most definitely apply. I was unaware of these programs because I did not know the Computational Finance was Financial Engineering.