Baruch tends to screen candidates even more aggressively than most. Applicants go through several rounds of interviews, as well as the school’s own assessment of their quantitative skills. Many turn down fancier offers elsewhere.
Bridging the prestige gap can be a challenge. Yurun Song, 23, was trading options in Shanghai when she stumbled on Baruch.
Her parents’ response: Baruch? They’d never heard of the place — unlike MIT and Columbia, where Song had also been accepted.
“My parents were worried,” she says with daughterly understatement.
This year, Song won the Rotman International Trading Competition, a global quant-fest in Toronto. She’s already lined up a hedge-fund job.
Yu Gan, Baruch MFE ’14, says he could’ve gone to more famous places too. He picked Baruch because of Stefanica’s reputation for nurturing quant careers. He used his Baruch contacts to land a job at Morgan Stanley and then hedge fund Seven Eight Capital. He’s running his own hedge fund now and has hired eight of his former classmates.
“The biggest resource is the community,” Gan says of the school.
With its ties on Wall Street, Baruch tries to tailor its program to industry demands — about 70% of the students end up going to work for hedge funds. The school was early to introduce courses on big data, machine learning and commodities trading, according to Alejandro Canete, MFE ’19, and member of the Baruch board.
“Baruch has been at forefront of curriculum innovation,” says Canete, who spent seven years at Millennium, founded by hedge-fund mogul Israel “Izzy” Englander, and is now the chief data officer at Chicago Trading Company. “The leadership can move fast and is tight with people in the industry.”
Another destination for Baruch quants: Virtu Financial Inc., the big high-frequency trading firm. Virtu recently hired two, according to Tyler Drake, head of non-customer market making there.
Virtu interviews a lot of people, Drake says, but Baruch stands out. “We turn down people with high GPAs from Stanford, Harvard, MIT,” he says. “Baruch’s program is so selective, they do a lot of the filtering for us.”
Granted, not everyone is going to find success and fulfillment in the art of algorithmic trading and hedging derivatives. But with the cost/benefit of higher ed under scrutiny, the Baruch equation adds up for its would-be Wall Streeters.
“We have the highest compensation and lowest tuition among the top 10 programs,” Stefanica says. Case in point: One of his students, he says, just landed a job at a major hedge fund for $500,000-plus a year.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.