- Headline
- Research before you join
I am a current first year student in the program and so far my experience with the program has been bad (being generous). The thing which the program advertises the most is large cohort, small class sizes, industry profs and large number of courses to choose from.
1. Large cohort and small class sizes: the obvious problem with this is that if there is a course which is high in demand, only 30 (or 20 in some cases) people will get it. There maybe multiple sections to the course but the content will vary vastly from one prof to another with one prof ending the course at risk neutral pricing and the other doing stochastic modelling. The course syllabus given is mainly for reference and most of the professors just mention what some approach or model is rather than going through the mechanics and helping us build intuition. You can google 10 different topic names and read the first page of the topic and be done with the course. In addition, the admissions criteria for the program is set very low and people with little to no background in either math or finance end up in the program which drives the stats lower. The cohort would be the most average cohort you can get.
2. Industry profs: the thing about industry profs is that most of them are very disconnected from how one should teach and structure the course. Most of the courses taken by them are 1.5 unit course (half semester) and the courses are very rushed with majority of them not completing the syllabus. A few of the profs don’t even have a syllabus but would teach topics what they feel like teaching. I am enrolling in the program to learn the concepts and build a toolkit, teaching some tips and tricks for on the job work will not help me clear interviews and every firm has different code base so majority of what you are teaching might not even be relevant. (Although there are some very good profs like prof. Tang, Adams, Mandel)
3. Large number of courses: Most of the courses are overlapping with each other and when asked for recommendation on what to take from the department the usual answer is choose what you want. In addition, as I pointed out earlier that majority of the courses are half semester courses, you just end up learning the jargon of the courses without building any skills. I am in my second semester with 12 credits remaining and can hardly fill it with 6 credits of acceptable courses for the next year.
The career service of the department is also bare minimum. There are no networking events organized and very few job postings (although LinkedIn has much more). I have gained much more valuable information by following Ashley Cross on LinkedIn (CMU’s career advisor) than my career department.
Advice to incoming students: Select your courses carefully and take advice from seniors on what courses to take. Start networking and preparing for interview from the day you receive admit. And lastly hope that we get a new program director who is decisive and can improve the program.
- Recommend
- No, I would not recommend this program
- Students Quality
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2.00 star(s)
- Courses/Instructors
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2.00 star(s)
- Career Services
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3.00 star(s)
