The curriculum of the MFE is entirely in English and consists of :
- Foundation courses
- Advanced courses
- Electives
MFE courses are designed exclusively for MFE students and are seamlessly integrated with one another. For example, the core courses in stochastic calculus and derivatives were conceived as a true sequence to allow students to learn the mathematical tools as they become necessary to the financial applications.
During the first semester students take a number of compulsory foundation courses that provide them with a solid fundamental understanding of the essentials of economics, finance, mathematics and econometrics.
The second and third semesters offer compulsory advanced courses in which the students learn about models at the forefront of both academic thinking and industry practice. In addition to compulsory advanced courses, the third semester offers also a wide range of electives, which allow students to tailor the curriculum of the program to their specific interests.
Foundations courses
The compulsory foundation courses provide students with in-depth coverage of the key concepts and topics with which every finance professional should be familiar. They also serve as a firm foundation for the advanced and elective courses. These courses cover the following areas:
- Introduction to finance
- Accounting for finance
- Econometrics
- Global Business environment
- Optimization methods
- Probability & stochastic calculus
Most of the foundation courses are taught in the first semester of coursework.
Advanced courses
In the second and third semester MFE students have to follow a number of advanced compulsory courses that cover important aspects of finance and financial engineering such as:
- Derivatives
- Investments
- Financial econometrics
- Interest rate and credit risk models
- Advanced derivatives
- Quantitative risk management
Detailed descriptions of all the MFE courses (including course contents, prerequisites and grading schemes) can be found by following the relevant links on the study plan page.
Elective courses
In the third semester, MFE students are free to choose a number of electives in order to tailor the program to the requirements of their career of choice. Examples of elective courses:
- Financial applications of blockchains and distributed ledgers
- Computational finance
- Financial big data
- Venture capital
- Intelligent agents
- Machine learning
- Machine learning programming
- Macrofinance
- Mathematical modeling of behavior
- Numerical approximation of PDE’s
- Regression methods
- Risk, rare events and extremes
- Time series
While the above list of courses illustrates the number and range of electives offered in the MFE program, the actual portfolio of courses in a given academic year may vary slightly from year to year depending on enrollment.
Internship and master thesis
The curriculum of the MFE is completed by a 6-month internship in the financial industry. During this period, each student must write a master thesis under the joint supervision of their internship advisor and one member of the MFE faculty acting as an academic advisor. For more details on the internship and master thesis follow the link to the master project page.