How much time do you spend outside of class on studying/HW?

[mastertrader]

I recently got admitted to UCLA's MFE program. I'm curious as to how much time students typically spend per week studying and doing coursework? When I first went to college I was told that to do well I would have to spend 2-3 hours out of class for every class. I quickly found that to be more like 20-30 minutes for every class hour when it wasn't Finals or Midterms. I come from more of a mathematics background than a coding background so I'm guessing I'll have more difficulties figuring out what's wrong with my code then trying to understand theory.

 

[A modest quant]

I recently got admitted to UCLA's MFE program. I'm curious as to how much time students typically spend per week studying and doing coursework? When I first went to college I was told that to do well I would have to spend 2-3 hours out of class for every class. I quickly found that to be more like 20-30 minutes for every class hour when it wasn't Finals or Midterms. I come from more of a mathematics background than a coding background so I'm guessing I'll have more difficulties figuring out what's wrong with my code then trying to understand theory.

Same here. I am now a trader with a quant background. I can't compete C++ coding skills with a "quant" developer sitting not far from me... From my experience, to understand the real world problems we must be out there, looking at these problems which by no means were caused by the math professors. Maths donot help here! Models are tools that donot dictate what we do or should do in real world. As for the coding, copy and paste approach is well adopted nowadays .. Why? There's nothing new in terms of models for the last three decades!

As for theory, there is so much in theory and yet not much. Why am i saying that? I myself keep questioning every assumption in the theory, especially those that should be realistic. For instance, you have to stop your professor or colleague when they say "...let start with a price model for a stock without paying dividends...". But wait a sec... all most every stock out there pays dividends. Why don't we start with a model for stock paying dividends? What happens if we do? If your professor starts theory with non-dividend paying stock first, and deal dividends after, then you're being punked!