Which schools have Mathematical Finance Majors

monydad
Wed, 01 Feb 2006 08:40:51 +0000

dstark: I am out for 5 years now from a rapidly changing field. We never encountered any undergrads who had suitable background at that time, so undergrad hiring never came up for us.

From what I’ve seen, the ideal profile would be:

bachelor’s degree in physics from an obviously top tier school with a big name

some couple courses relevant to financial applications
-two year analyst job on the trading floor of a securities firm
-MS degree from Carnegie Mellon, or maybe U Chicago MBA with a quantitative twist. Or better yet, physical sciences PhD with coursework from any of these financial engineering programs.

See it’s not only that they know all these analytical techniques. They also have to be smart enough to apply different techniques to problems that may come up, that don’t have answers yet. They need a really big bag of analytical tools Then they need the intellectual horsepower to apply the tools to new, uncharted situations. I’ve heard of guys doing programming in these areas who had PhDs in particle physics.

You can get this training from ucsb. But I don’t know if it’s enough, or if the big shops will be looking at ucsb as a source for this kind of talent.