<p>Arrid- when you mean “grad school” as a place to relax and make friends you must mean an MBA right? a financial engineering masters or a masters in math/CS/stat is very hard and only the most able students from undergrad can do well in the coursework.</p>
<p>To the OP- top notch quant finance programs include NYU, Berkeley, Columbia, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon Stanford, UChicago, Cornell, UCLA, Michigan among others (no particular order). In terms of recruiting, my guess is Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia, CMU and NYU have the strongest contacts on the street.</p>