Brown's COE vs Cal's IEOR

icebox4
Tue, 27 May 2008 00:16:38 +0000

hi,

i’ve been reading your posts and it seems that you’re extremely interested to go to graduate financial mathematics (engineering… whatever). i might head towards that direction (depending on job offers at the end of this summer), so here’s my opinion:

berkeley has incredibly solid engineering department. and at a large public university, you might find more research opportunities, just through the virtue of numbers of faculty. on top of that, berkeley’s MFE program is regarded as top 3 in the world. going there might provide you the chance to network with the faculty, et cetera.

on the other hand, brown’s applied mathematics/CS is ridiculously good. there has been an increasing push in the applied mathematics department to strengthen its financial mathematics offering at undergraduate level, as the demand from students keeps on increasing. research is a little bit tricky here. i know CS department fosters undergraduate research since day one – many of my friends stayed here during the summer doing CS research, after their freshman year. on the other hand, the applied mathematics department is rather detached from its undergraduates in terms of research. most of the funding goes to major projects and graduate student funding. you might want to forget about COE, because I don’t see value-added in your case there (not as quantitative). also, brown has a slight geographical edge for being 3.5 hours away from NYC.

at the end of the day, going to a good MFE program depends mostly not on where you go to, but what did you do at those schools. this means working your ass off learning copious amounts of probability, statistics, analysis and finance – all of which are available at both schools.

i am impressed that you are able to map out the next 5-6 years of your life before even entering college…