UMich MFE的一些介绍

一木菩提UID: 2390164

声明： 所有的信息我都会注明出处，但是可靠性请自行辨别。


目录：
本楼：官方网站的一些信息
一楼：Review of UMich MFE
二楼：some info about summer internship


---------------正文的分割线------------------------

官方网址：
http://financialeng.engin.umich.edu/

Deadlines:

Admissions Deadlines

Applications are accepted for the Summer term only. All students must attend the mandatory FE Summer Program that begins in mid-July.

Application deadlines for all Financial Engineering domestic and international applicants are:

    * Deadline 2: February 15
    * Deadline 1: November 1

All applications completed by the November 1st deadline will be processed as quickly as possible, preferably by February 1st. The final application deadline is February 15.

Prerequisite:

The average applicant's GPA is 3.6–4.0

Entering Students should have a strong mathematical background similar to that of University of Michigan undergraduates majoring in IOE, Mathematics and Statistics (with applied concentrations), EECS (with economic interests), Economics or Business (with technical interests).

In particular, students should have previously completed:

    * Two years of college mathematics including multivariable calculus, differential equations and linear algebra (Math 115, 116, 215, {216 or 316}, {214 or 217 or 417 or 419)
    * Two terms of calculus-based probability and statistics (Math/Stat 425 and Stat 426 or IOE 265 and 316/366 or EECS 401 and Stat 426)
    * Basic microeconomic theory/time value of money/interest: (Econ 401)
    * An introductory finance course (FIN 551)
    * Accounting Principles (ACC 501)
    * Mastery of Computer Programming skills (C or C++; SAS, visual basic, and MATLAB are prerequisites). Any student without the mastery of these computer programming skills is strongly urged to overload in appropriate courses during the program to ensure complete mastery. Furthermore, any courses taken to make-up computer programming or any other deficiency will not count toward electives.

In addition, applicants whose native language is not English must demonstrate English proficiency. More information and required test scores.

Courses shown in parentheses indicate University of Michigan courses that typically cover the prerequisite material. Students not presenting transcripts showing these prerequisite courses may occasionally be admitted with course "deficiencies." All identified deficiencies are focused on during the mandatory FE Summer Program in July prior to the start of the first Fall term.

一木菩提UID: 2390164

转自Quantnet
Review of University of Michigan's MFE program

http://www.quantnet.com/review-michigan-mfe-program

------------------------------------------------
This review was submitted on 3/26/2010 at 4:00:11 by a student who studied full-time in the program from 7/2008-4/30/2010*

Can you tell us a bit about your background?
Work Ex: Accounting and fixed income derivatives trading desk support.
Educational background: Finance and computer science

Did you get admitted to other programs?
N/A

Why did you choose this program (over others, if applicable)?
I chose the Michigan program because of its flexibility, relationship with a strong MBA program, and the overall reputation of Michigan as a business school and in general.

Tell us about the application process at this program
Same as the other school’s processes except that Michigan required a 2 minute video monologue. Did not have to correspond with the administration during the application process.

On a scale of 1-10, how would you grade the accessibility of the faculty and staff?
8

Programs like Baruch MFE, UCB MFE have refresher courses for incoming students. Does this program offer such courses? How useful was it?
Michigan has a fairly intensive mandatory summer program from July-August and organized in a modular format. There are no grades but participation in all modules is mandatory.

The program covers all fundamental topics from corporate finance to calculus to C++. Because of its broad scope, most students including myself found some parts useful and some parts not. For e.g. I had a strong finance background so the finance & econ segments were useless to me, whereas the I was very happy to have the calculus, probability and stats because my math background was relatively weak; most students had strong math backgrounds and so many felt the other way around. Overall my opinion of the program was positive for these reasons: gets you back into academic mode if you’ve been away from academics for a while, and it gives you the chance and time to brush up on areas of weakness ahead of some very demanding semesters.

On a scale of 0-10, how would you grade the usefulness of these refresher courses?
7

Tell us about the courses selection in this program. Any special courses you like?
The flexibility of the curriculum was one of the biggest draws for me. A large proportion of credits are electives, and you can direct these elective credits toward making your program very quantitative or less quant-heavy. I was never interested in becoming a “quant” and the Michigan program allowed me to get about a 60-40 split between quantitative and MBA finance courses. However, one can make it 80-20 or more if one wishes.

My favorite quant finance courses were the capstone Financial Engineering II and Computational Finance courses because they made you actually do, instead of just passively learn, financial engineering type stuff. The FE II course had a heavy amount of project work and if you are looking for quant roles, you would have several instances of self-contained, practical project work that you could show employers. The computational finance course is all very hands-on type of work, with most students choosing Matlab for implementation. Both classes are requisites and are very demanding.

My favorite MBA finance courses were Advanced Equity Security Analysis (fundamental stock selection taught by a seasoned buy-side PM), Financial Trading (practical market making course), Private Equity (all work is on live PE deals with tremendous exposure to industry players), and Applied Financial Analysis and Portfolio Management (practical course where you play the part of a buy-side sector analyst on a real equity fund). These courses are all electives. Note that you can take a PE course in an MFE program. You can actually take just about any higher level MBA finance course as an elective.

On a scale of 1-10, how would you grade the flexibility of the curriculum?
10

Tell us about the quality of teaching
I thought that most instructors were good, a couple were unforgettably amazing, and a couple were completely forgettable. A significant downside to the Michigan program in my opinion is the dearth of practitioners. Although there is a lot of solid theory behind it, finance is a craft, and no matter how well you know your subject matter and how good a teacher you are, you cannot teach what a practitioner can, which is the craft side of it.

There were TAs for just about every class but I never used them [because I'm so smart].

On a scale of 1-10, how would you grade the quality of teaching?
8

Materials used in the program
For the quantitative finance courses: Shreve I & II, Tomas Björk (arb theory in continuous time), Glasserman (MC methods in FE), Wilmott (mathematics of financial derivatives), Hull, Cornuejols (optimization methods in finance).

On a scale of 1-10, how would you grade the practicality of the curriculum?
8

Programming component of the program
Depending on what electives you take, there can be a lot of programming. Among the required courses, there are three courses that require programming. For two of these you can choose to use whatever applications you want, with most students choosing Matlab, and for the third we used R.

Projects
All projects were group projects. Among the required quantitative finance courses, examples of projects were modeling the implied vol surface for equity options and modeling the yield curve using various interest rate models. There are quantitative finance electives which I did not take that have very heavy project work. The MBA finance electives I took had a lot of very practical project work. In my opinion there is enough project work that you can do and have to show employers examples of your work.

Career service
The MFE program is housed in the engineering school but is a JV between the engineering side and the business school. MFEs now have full access to both engineering recruitment and business school recruitment resources (on-campus hiring, alumni databases, career counseling, etc). In the past access to b-school resources was curbed but no longer; and from now on there should be an escalation of hiring opps through the b-school as the MFE program gets more visibility amongst recruiters who traditionally came to the b-school knowing only the b-school talent pool.

A word of caution for prospective students with full-time work ex: Michigan is by and large not a target school for associate-level sales & trading recruiters. Banks are happy to interview and hire MFEs without full-time work ex (or very limited full-time work ex) for analyst positions, i.e. they club MFEs without work ex along with bachelors students in the b-school. However they just don’t seem to like Michigan for associate-level hiring into sales & trading; they seem to go to Chicago and Wharton & the other ivies.

On another note, we unfortunately don’t get the hedge funds that NYU and Columbia probably get being in Manhattan, but we do get some prop trading firms given our proximity to Chicago.

On a scale of 1-10, how would you grade the career service for internship and full-time job?
7

Can you comment on the social interaction between students of different ethnics, nationalities in the program?
There was a fair amount of cross-ethnic interaction as far as coursework went, but as far as “socializing” went, my take on it is that a large portion of the Chinese students did cordon themselves off whereas most other people intermingled. Also, I put socializing in quotes because we are talking about MFEs, and MFEs (in all programs, not just U-M) aren’t the most gregarious creatures in the world.

What do you like about the program?
The flexibility of the program. The ability to get a mix of quantitative and non-quantitative finance coursework. Michigan alumni network.

On a scale of 1-10, how would you grade the value of the program for the price tag?
8

What DON’T you like about the program?
Not enough practitioners on the faculty, a serious negative in my opinion.

Not enough financial engineering specific career counseling. There’s counseling through the b-school and there’s counseling through engineering, but they are not very useful for MFE students, who have their own differentiated backgrounds, skill sets, and career focuses.

Suggestions for the program to make it better
The program should have a focused and comprehensive career services effort especially for MFE students, i.e. career services beyond a resume book, resume critiquing, general interview prep, etc.

The program also needs more marketing, it is a very good program but I believe that it does not have enough visibility amongst other MFE programs and other Masters programs in general.

On a scale of 1-10, how would you grade your experience in the program?
9

What are your current job status? What are you looking for?
Prefer to keep this info private.

On a scale of 1-10, would you recommend this program to others?
8

Besides the program’s websites, what alternative sources of info you used to learn more about the program?
Forums (especially QuantNet) and alumni.

一木菩提UID: 2390164

关于暑期实习的一些信息
转自一个UMich学生的博客
http://umichiganmfe.blogspot.com
国内的同学需要翻墙

SUMMER INTERNSHIP INFO SO FAR:
There is a 4 month summer break and one must find an internship; there is almost no coursework over summer that counts toward the degree (there is one real world project-based financial engineering course possible but I don’t think it is available every summer).
    Given how royally screwed up things are in our beloved financial industry, I was honestly surprised to see how many recruiters came to campus.
There is a ton of i-banking (I include here private equity, venture capital) and consulting recruiting at both the analyst and associate level.
    Now I just want to give some general info to foreign students and others who may not be familiar with the internship programs at banks.
All the major banks have the same position hierarchy.
The entry-level position is the “Analyst” position.
The next higher up is the “Associate” [then typically Assistant VP, VP, Senior VP, MD].
It so happens that many of the banks look to take MFEs (along with other non-MBA Masters degree students) into their Analyst program along with undergraduate students, and to take MBA students into their Associate programs.
But if you have a Masters degree then why shouldn’t you get an Associate position?
Their answer is relevant work experience.
MBAs typically have several years of relevant work ex, and MFEs typically do not.
    Now look, if you have some years of relevant, financial industry work ex, then of course you belong in an Associate position and they will consider you in this category (and they will usually disqualify you for Analyst positions because you are overqualified), so it is fair.
    Getting back to on-campus internship recruiting.
So there is a ton of i-banking/private equity and consulting recruiting at both levels.
But as an MFE you would most likely be looking at Sales and Trading and Investment Management (S&T and IM from here on out).
There was also a lot of S&T and IM recruiting for Analysts positions (just about every big-name bank showed up), but very poor recruiting for S&T Associate positions.
If they hired anywhere for Associate positions in S&T in this miserable economy it would be at Wharton, Columbia, a few of the other Ivies, and Stern.
So as good and as high in the rankings as Michigan is (Ross 12th best B-School in nation by US News and ranked 5th best B-School in nation by Businessweek for 2008), you will see more S&T and IM recruitment at these schools, and relevantly more during recessions like this.
    But as you know banks aren’t the only places to go.
Besides i-banks several market-making/prop-trading firms are recruiting interns on campus (there are many based out of near-by Chicago), and here you don’t have competition from MBAs since they want quantitative people.
They don’t really have the same hierarchical designations as the banks either.
We also have several hedge funds but many are looking for either undergrad interns or US citizens.
    Which brings me to one more important point.
Independent of which school you go to, if you are a foreign national, you will be PO’ed at how many internship and full-time job postings you see that are for US citizens only.
How many companies have this stipulation?
Hard to say.
Major banks do not have this stipulation (1 or 2 exceptions), they are very diverse organizations.
Nor do most independent trading firms to my knowledge.
Many regional banks do.
Many hedge funds do.
Many other small financial companies do.
What can you do about this?
Nothing so don’t worry about it, just wanted you to be prepared.
    This being a very long post I will stop it soon.
In closing, I want to summarize my assessment of internship opportunities at U-M to avoid any confusion.
I am disappointed in the amount of Associate-level S&T and IM on-campus internship recruiting by the banks.
I am genuinely pleasantly surprised at the amount of Analyst-level S&T on-campus internship recruiting by the big i-banks and at the amount of all other recruiting.
Know that my assessment is based on a sample of size of one: internship recruiting at U-M for summer 2009, which is not a typical recruiting season.
I will write more about on-campus internship recruiting later as the internship recruiting season progresses and as I gather more information.

alexanderheUID: 2491856

这个项目好贵

一木菩提UID: 2390164

4# alexanderhe

FE里面就没便宜的项目

promising~UID: 2569086

可惜，沙发没有抢到啊
地板还有剩么:)
赞辛苦

knightgeoffUID: 2601211

斑竹你还记得我不？呵呵，可否给些申请Michigan时需要做的那个DV的建议呢？
5# 一木菩提

sarachungUID: 2727698

希望楼主可以给一些DV的建议~~

lovelessangelUID: 2942701

刚刚拿到这个项目的AD,还拿到了BU数理的AD,有点犹豫选哪个?...看了LZ的文感觉就业还是有些困难额?