From the Director

Welcome to the Master of Science in Financial Engineering (MSFE) Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign!

Financial engineering brings together finance, mathematics, statistics, computing, and, increasingly, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Our goal is straightforward: to give students strong quantitative foundations and opportunities to apply them to problems that financial institutions are working on today.

The Illinois MSFE program is jointly sponsored by the Grainger College of Engineering and Gies College of Business. Students receive rigorous training in finance and quantitative methods while having considerable flexibility to shape the program around their interests through electives, projects, and concentrations. Areas of study range from derivatives and stochastic modeling to machine learning, financial risk management, numerical methods, high-frequency trading, and algorithmic trading.

Learning by doing is an important part of the program. Every MSFE student completes a Practicum, working as part of a team on a semester-long project supplied and supervised by an industry sponsor. These are not classroom exercises with predetermined answers. Projects have addressed problems such as SPX-VIX joint calibration using neural stochastic differential equations, quantitative trading, risk modeling, alternative data, and machine learning. Students work closely with sponsors throughout the semester and showcase their work in the Annual MSFE Practicum Competition.

Students also learn directly from practitioners outside the classroom. Our Practitioner Speaker Series connects students with quantitative finance professionals who share their work, experience, and perspectives on developments in the industry. The student-led Financial Engineering Club organizes practitioner talks, workshops on topics such as options pricing and large language models, and student projects involving machine learning and AI in finance. Together, these activities allow students to explore new areas, develop practical skills, and interact with professionals working in the field.

Our graduates pursue careers across quantitative finance. Alumni have joined firms including Jump Trading, Point72, Millennium, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, CME Group, Capital One, EY, Houlihan Lokey, and many others. Their roles span quantitative research, trading, risk management, derivatives pricing and modeling, quantitative development, portfolio and asset management, financial consulting, and data science and AI. This range of outcomes reflects both the breadth of financial engineering and the diverse interests and strengths our students bring to the program.

For prospective students, I encourage you to explore our curriculum, concentrations, Practicum projects, placement information, student organizations, and alumni stories on this website. Together, they provide a good picture of what our students study, what they work on, and where the program can lead. MSFE is a demanding program, but it also gives students considerable flexibility to discover the areas of financial engineering that interest them and build relevant experience before graduation.

We are equally interested in hearing from companies and industry practitioners. We welcome Practicum projects built around real problems that your organization would like a quantitative student team to investigate. Projects may involve trading, derivatives, risk, portfolio management, market or alternative data, financial modeling, machine learning, AI, or other areas of quantitative finance. Students work with sponsors throughout the semester, giving companies an opportunity to investigate a problem of genuine interest while giving students experience working on real industry problems.

There are many other ways to work with us. We welcome practitioners to speak in our seminar series, share their experience with students, recruit for internships and full-time positions, and participate in other program activities. Employers interested in our students can also contact us for access to our resume book.

Whether you are considering joining MSFE as a student or working with us as an industry partner, we would be glad to hear from you. We look forward to continuing to build a community in which students, faculty, alumni, and practitioners learn from and work with one another.

Sincerely,

Liming Feng
Director, Master of Science in Financial Engineering
Associate Professor, Department of Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign