Quant Guide 2022: Georgia Institute of Technology

Atlanta, US

 

 

Georgia Institute of Technology’s Master of Science in Quantitative and Computational Finance has grown over the past 12 months. The programme, run by finance professor Sudheer Chava, has enrolled 62 students in the latest intake, and has seen average graduate starting salaries rise to over $100,000. Most students take positions in banking, with smaller proportions entering asset management and consulting.

The course emphasises fast-paced ‘boot camp’ courses and industry-led workshop elements, which Chava says have been popular over 2021. Boot camps on offer include intensive courses such as design of systems for computational finance, and programming-specific classes. The master’s students are particularly keen on courses involving project elements, large datasets, modelling and programming.

“We’ve made use of practitioners for [these classes]: John Guerard from McKinley Capital; Jonathan Regenstein from Truist Securities; and Nuyun Zhang from Microsoft, among others,” he says.

The main programming languages used are Python, R and C++, with SAS and Matlab also used in some classes, Chava says: “In addition, we have boot camps for machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch.”

The programme once again reports a 100% employment rate in finance six months after graduation. Chava anticipates that the latest intake will achieve the same. The pandemic caused some temporary disruption to internship placements, he notes, although most students managed to find alternatives.

“Initially, some of the internship offers were rescinded,” he recalls. “But students managed to get new remote offers, and, in the end, almost 94% received internships during summer 2020 and 2021.”

View this institution’s entry in the 2021 guide

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