Key MFE courses for quant trading?

[youngs]

I'm one semester into a two-year quant finance masters program at a good European school, and I want to go into prop quant trading after graduation.

Trying to optimize my focus a bit, a few questions:

Which types of classes are most important? Eg programming, pure math, derivatives pricing, etc. Both in terms of the content being directly applicable to quant trading job, and any signaling value.​

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How are master's theses viewed? Is it best to choose a topic directly relevant to a target job, or is the general evidence of "successful self-directed work on a complex topic of any kind" sufficient?​

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How important are grades, in general? My impression is that having good grades is a necessary but (obviously) not sufficient condition, and there's rapidly diminishing value in having perfect grades vs just clearing a "good" hurdle; is this correct?​

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How are personal quant trading projects viewed? Say I spend a few months building a bot that makes a solid return trading crypto, and get fairly into the weeds with the programming/software engineering details. Is this actively helpful for my resume?​

 

[tips]

If you have previous work experience most employers just ask for your resume and don’t really care about the transcript much