Quant Guide 2020: New York University (Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences)

New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences hosts one of the two NYU master’s programmes in this year’s Risk.net quant guide; the Tandon School of Engineering, across the river in Brooklyn, hosts the other. Both programmes are ranked in the top 10 this year, and one might imagine that a degree of friendly competition exists between them; Courant has the advantages of proximity to the main NYU campus in Greenwich Village, while students at Tandon enjoy a shorter travel time to Wall Street.

Courant’s programme is completed in three semesters, over the course of a year and a half, and it boasts a 100% graduate employment rate. Its academic director is Petter Kolm, a clinical professor of mathematics. He says he keeps the programme up to scratch with the changing demands of employers with the help of a faculty full of “industry veterans” – several Risk.net quant of the year award winners among them, including Leif Andersen and Fabio Mercurio, and a lifetime achievement award winner in Bruno Dupire.

Over the past year, the master’s has made several additions to its curriculum. These include a two-week boot camp before classes begin, which focuses on basic career skills and object-oriented programming in Java. New modules include Python programming language and the Pandas software library, as well as machine learning and computational techniques for quantitative finance. Kolm leads a new seminar series, open to students and the quant community at large, on the topic of mathematical finance and financial data science.

Graduates, Kolm says, are taking jobs in buy-side and machine learning-related positions in growing numbers. Staff have also seen an uptick in hiring for regulatory and risk management roles.

View this institution’s entry in the 2019 guide

View other universities and a guide to the metrics tables