Is MFE a good fit for me?

[nezuko]

Hi all,
I(21y/o Female) am a CS undergrad(2023) from a top university in India, with a low GPA(2.5/4). I am currently working in the data science field at a healthcare startup. I scored a 100 percentile on my GMAT FE.
Some background about me:
I've been an academically bright student all my childhood, and was extremely good at math back then. I entered engineering with confidence. In my first year of undergrad, my roommate(who was the topper of our batch) died by suicide; the following year my sister was diagnosed with Schizophrenia. All that had a major impact on me, I couldn't cope, and thought of the degree as a curse in a way(I regret it now). I thought of my 4 years of coursework as something that was to be finished asap and I never put effort into excelling. After my undergrad, I thought I wasn't good enough for CS and that I ruined my career. I gave my GMAT to gain confidence that I still have it in me to study.

My initial plans were to get into the management side and pursue MiM, to shift to consulting as love to work on data-driven strategizing. Now, my friends and family suggested that I check out the MFE program as it is essentially Math, Programming, and Finance. I took up one Finance course (Financial Institutions and Markets) in my last year of undergrad and that sparked interest in me.
However, I am aware that MFE is programming-heavy. I am scared of feeling the same as I did in undergrad again in the MFE program. The MFE courses seem interesting and rewarding but I'm not sure if I should be pursuing it. On the other hand, MiM seems good too; but the courses don't seem as rewarding to me as the MFE courses do. MiM seems like something I would be able to move forward with smoothly.

Another issue is that not all schools offering the MFE program accept GMAT scores.
Please give me any advice/suggestions you have; if you feel there are any points I am missing currently which would help me evaluate a little better. No matter what I choose, I want to do it happily with no second thoughts in my mind.

 

[arohan]

I think you should explore quant finance a bit more to get an idea of what its about and whether you’d like the work. If you like your work as a data scientist, quant is somewhat similar, although I doubt any career path post an MiM would be in any way comparable to either data science or quant. It’s a different world.

In a nutshell, quant is, essentially, the application of mathematics to formulate and frame a subjective problem in finance and then solve it programmatically. The programming involved would be quite different from something like CS or SDE and, I would think, a lot similar to data science.