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A group of students at Montana State University are in their first semester of a new financial engineering program that will feature professors from two colleges.
The new program, approved by the Montana Board of Regents last year, will allow MSU undergraduate students to major or minor in financial engineering with a curriculum of courses spanning the Department of Agricultural Economics and Economics in the College of Agriculture and the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering in the College of Engineering.[prbreak][/prbreak]
MSU will be one of the only universities in the West to offer students a degree in this increasingly important discipline, said Wendy Stock, professor and head of the Department of Agricultural Economics and Economics.
While the program will largely focus on the kind of computer modeling and theory used to predict market behavior and manage risk in the context of the financial sector, Watts said students would also come away with skills applicable to important Montana industries like agriculture, mining and timber. National statistics put average salary range at $74,000 to 115,000, according to the website PayScale.
“We feel really good about the launch of this program,” Watts said. “We’ve had calls from as far away as Florida and we’ve had a lot of interest from students who are already enrolled at MSU.”