Master in financial math vs financial engineering

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According to my research, Berkeley is the best place for MFE. NYU follows closely at number 2. Stanford is the third one, among with many schools such as Columbia.

so what if Berkeley is public? Don't you care most about placement subsequent to the program?

I'd go with Berkeley or NYU. Stanford definitely has a better brand name and I would be very tempted to take Stanford even if NYU has better placements.

Agreed that Stanford has better name.

How about UCB vs NYU in terms of brand? I worked on the street and I've seen first-hand the stigma associated with public schools. Maybe berkeley is an exception though, not sure.

I'm sorry I messed up that last post. I believe Stanford is placing really well now but the program quality is not as good as NYU. NYU according to some of the professors I've spoken to here is still one of the more rigorous and recognized programs. I have been considering MFE programs for a while and have been doing a lot of research over the past 2-3 months on a variety of schools and have spoken to admissions officers, some faculty here who are familiar with financial engineering programs as well as some people in the quant side of the street (hedge funds) and the verdict is that NYU (Courant) or CMU should be my top choice in the US. So if I were in your shoes.

1) NYU 2) Stanford 3) Berkeley

I have to disagree. All those programs are great but princeton masters of finance tops all.

Yeah, but the OP cannot go to Princeton because a) He wants to be a financial engineer and b) He didn't list Princeton as one of his three choices. I also agree that all three programs are fantastic and choosing one would be a tough choice.

im at nyu; i'm auditing a mathfin class right now. they are facing an extremely hard recruiting season as well. they get some special offers that come only to nyu (same as if you were at any of the other schools), but even that won't suffice. i heard only 1 person has a goldman quant (gsam) offer. some others are interviewing at other places like cs, hedge funds, etc...

nyu's program is decent, but the core is pretty large. you would come out of it with a strong general mathfin education rathar than a specialized track in derivatives, or quant asset mgmt; although, i think you could push all your electives to one side or the other....

one upside is that the teachers at nyu's program are great; almost all of them practitioners. hope this helps.

Placement is bad everywhere, except maybe for analysts because they're cheap and hard working and easy to exploit.

Actually, I am not sure things will be dramatically different next year. Probably not...

I mean, in terms of "the degree being what you make of it".

You can take many electives in economics/GSB/math etc too.

Princeton is not an option for me.

But still, my point about no dedicated placement officer stands. Another thing that has NYU going is obviously its location.

yeah, I would go with NYU or Berkeley- one really good thing about UCB is they place interns off cycle so you don't have competition from the other math finance/MBA students for summer jobs- similar to Dartmouth's 'wintern' program on the D-plan... that advantage is not to be understated since the competition for summer 2010 internships will be brutal (you've got an advantage here because you've traded before, but some quant groups actually prefer newbies who come from academia or research labs)... UCB (based on its brochure) places plenty of people at NY banks and basically has a monopoly on BGI.

NYU has the advantage of some really famous researchers like Avellaneda, Carr, Gatheral, Almgren. I've heard from friends that the teaching is a bit uneven, like every top school. In terms of brand and content, CMU, UCB, Columbia, Cornell, U of C, Michigan, NYU, Stanford, Princeton all are pretty similar. Two semesters or three semesters is not enough time to really learn the material if you don't have a strong background coming into it. I think that's why Chicago requires the Math GRE and UCB requires CFA 1. I would look into getting Shreve's Stochastic Calc II and trying to self-study a bit (very dense material for sure).

Such as Jorion, H. Leland, R. Kahn, M. Rubinstein, etc.

I'm at the Stanford program; chose it over NYU. It is certainly a math intensive program although you can take a bunch of GSB and CS electives and shape your program the way you want to.

Internships are hard to come by; I managed to land one last month, but a majority of guys in my class are headed either to jobs/internships that they were at before they came to the program, or plan to work do research at Stanford over the summer and apply for PhD programs.