The Quantitative Finance specialization in the Ph.D. in Management Science and Analytics program is excellent preparation for either academic careers or for students who want to apply the theoretical, analytical, and quantitative rigor of management science to careers in finance.
Dissertation research in this area may include a wide range of topics such as risk modeling, financial time series analysis, and investment analysis.
Required courses for the Quantitative Finance specialization (three credits per course):
- MSC 621—Corporate Finance
- MSC 623—Investments
- MSC 631—Theory of Finance I
- MSC 633—Theory of Finance II
- MSF 545/MSC 613—Structured Fixed Income Portfolios
- MSF 546/MSC 614—Quantitative Investment Strategies
View the curriculum for the Ph.D. in Management Science (MSC) program and MSC course descriptions.
Career Opportunities
Industry and Research
The specialization in Quantitative Finance prepares students for a wide range of careers in finance, particularly in areas such as investment and commercial banking, trading, and risk management. This background also opens career opportunities across industries in business functions focused on finance, financial modeling, economics, and risk compliance.
Chicago’s position as a global center for finance and fintech, as well as the home to the world’s largest markets in financial derivatives, make it a prime location for internships, networking, and job opportunities for Stuart students in quantitative finance.
Our graduates are ready to step into roles such as:
- Senior quantitative analyst or quantitative analytics manager-economic modeling
- Quantitative developer, senior quantitative modeler, or quantitative risk modeler
- Research data scientist, senior quantitative researcher, or quantitative researcher-asset management
- Portfolio risk analyst, senior quantitative risk analyst, or exotic rates quantitative analyst
- Equity derivatives quantitative strategist or quantitative portfolio strategist
- Senior quantitative markets analyst or machine learning analyst
Academia
Students interested in academic careers are supported by strong mentoring relationships with our faculty, opportunities to co-author papers published in prestigious scholarly journals, and help in securing adjunct positions to develop their teaching skills.
As a result, our graduates have launched teaching and research careers as finance faculty members at colleges and universities in the United States and around the world, such as:
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Beijing Normal University
- Lewis University
- Brooklyn College - City University of New York
- Benedictine University
- Northeastern Illinois University
- East China Normal University
- Saint Michael’s College (Vermont)