I am currently a Quantitative Finance student at Fordham University. I have read your many negative comments about my school and I felt compelled to offer you my humble opinion about the program, and why you may be receiving negative information about it.
There are many positive aspects of our program that are not shared by other quantitative finance programs in this country. I was accepted into six financial engineering programs along the east cost and I chose Fordham because it does offer something different. The majority of masters program out there are composed of 30-36 credits. For financial engineering programs this will be composed of a few math courses, some computer programming, and the rest of the courses will focus on risk analysis, derivatives, investment analysis, and interest rate modeling. Our program is composed of 55 credits, and therefore we are exposed to a wider array of financial products, and to more topics than other masters programs allow.
We take several courses in economic theory (micro, macro, and financial theory), and we also take courses in fixed income analysis, portfolio management, M&A, and corporate finance. This offers us a chance to develop a much broader skill set that is not common in other programs. We gain these classes without the loss of our many traditional financial engineering courses including risk analytics, derivatives, stochastic calculus, credit risk, simulations, etc.
I will not say that Fordham should match up with many other financial engineering programs, because we simply learn something different. We do not study C++, which allows people (like myself) who carry out their undergraduate work in economics or finance a chance to learn the mathematics behind finance without studying C++ for several years prior to graduate school. Making the assumption that this limits our quantitative ability is incorrect. Most of us can rattle off the Ito’s Lemma along with the implications (as well as volumes of other probability and stochastic theory), and we can easily sit down and solve complex SDE’s for the development of financial models. Those who are not able to carry out these essential tasks can not do so because they have not personally put forth the effort; it is not a failure of the school. We implement these theories using somewhat simpler programming languages (MATLAB, SAS, VBA), but transferring our knowledge of these languages into C++ is a matter syntax.
While we happen to be in a new program, I think those of us who have put forth the required effort will experience exceptional success in this industry in the future. Those who can not put forth the effort in an academic program shouldn’t be trying to work on Wall Street in the first place. That being said, I welcome your (and anyone else’s) criticism of our program, because it gives me ample opportunity to convince my future employers otherwise.
