Umich vs Wash for engineering

bearcats
Sat, 01 Jun 2013 18:21:48 +0000

Strongly advice against doing financial engineering these days. That skill set just really isnt in demand right now. MFE is very pricing oriented and there just aren’t much appetite for serious complex derivative/structured products (CDOs on junior tranches with unique custom features/quantos/baskets/himalayas/FX correlation/compounds etc) these days. This is obviously unfortunate thanks to the disfunctional washington politics. For the very few seats that are available, banks would rather go with a physics/math phd.

The MFE skill set is also not very translatable to buy side quant (which is where the growth for quant finance is really happening these days). Even grads from top programs are having some trouble looking for jobs. Strongly recommend something less pricing oriented like Princeton MFin (very quantitative, somewhat like MFE but not exactly) or MIT MFin (less quantitative, more general finance with a quant skew).

however if you are set on doing MFE or any finance related master you should go to michigan. Academically it doesn’t really matter, you just need to do well (3.8+ for very top programs). However, high finance recruit michigan better so you are more likely to score better internships which matters in MFin and MFE admissions.