Prof. Peter Carr: New York is the headquarters
for finance
in the world. There's a certain mentality
that it needs to be learned, you got to
walk the walk and talk the talk.
Prof. Peter Carr: Well, the program has essentially
been an
MBA with quant. We're leaning more
towards making it heavier in technology.
The financial technology is an extremely
important component.
Prof. Barry Blecherman: We as financial
engineers, we build things. We build
things that serve people. They're
mathematically based like any other
engineering discipline and they have
limits of their use.
Prof. Peter Carr: The financial regulation has changed everything, so we
have designed new courses to help people
to understand the impact of regulation,
to essentially thrive under this new
regime. Mortgage industry is a huge
industry, I mean, just think about all the
houses owned by people in United States.
It's trillions of dollars, yet the
typical quant finance program maybe has
one course on it.
Prof. Barry Blecherman: But what is it a
financial engineer needs to be
successful? First, foremost, you need
knowledge. You're gonna walk into a
situation that's intense and people have
been working on problems for a long time
and you need to be able to walk in with
the knowledge where you can quickly contribute.
Prof. Peter Carr: Tandon school is big, so we
have a lot of students and students can
learn from each other as a result. The
fact that we have a lot of students means we
have a lot of courses and a lot of
practitioners to teach them. There's a
great diversity here. We teach classes
that are not normally taught.
Prof. Barry Blecherman: Here we offer
50 or 60 different classes every
semester without fail.
Prof. Peter Carr: You have a
Bloomberg lab. We have something called
MakerSpace that is full of things like
3D printers. But other things we envision
are potentially courses that are in the
intersection of, say, machine learning,
which is an area we're focused on, and
finance or accounting.
Prof. Barry Blecherman: The fact that
we're two subway stops away from Wall Street--
Prof. Peter Carr: There's no reason that, you know,
we can't take advantage of our greater
locational access, you know. Even Brooklyn
itself has a burgeoning financial industry.
Prof. Barry Blecherman: We can have people come in as
guest lecturers or even guest professors.
Why not learn from somebody who's
already doing it? Why not learn in an
environment where
getting an internship means getting on
the subway? Being in New York, there's no
substitute for being in New York if this
is the world you want to be in.
Prof. Peter Carr: I just spoke to a graduating
student today,
she's going to be working for J.P.Morgan
and she says she had a second offer from
Amazon. Being self-sufficient will go
a long way and this is part of that.
I mean, laying back and having things
delivered up to you is just not the way to go.
Prof. Barry Blecherman: If you got the math, and you
got the
desire, and you're willing to work hard,
and you're honest, then you're just like
all of our students here.
Prof. Peter Carr: If students realize
that this is not just skill acquisition
but more broadly cultural acquisition, I
think it'll help them a lot.
