The School of Engineering of Boğaziçi University, in collaboration with the School of Economics and Administrative Sciences and the School of Arts and Sciences, is starting a new Master of Science (MS) degree program in Financial Engineering (FE)
This is an interdisciplinary program offered jointly by the Department of Industrial Engineering, Department of Mathematics and the Department of Management. It is the first academic program in Financial Engineering in Turkey that is recently approved by Higher Education Council (YÖK). It is organized as a Secondary Graduate Program of the Institute for Graduate Studies in Science and Engineering.
"Secondary Graduate Programs" are distinguished from the regular graduate programs in two aspects. In the Secondary Graduate Programs:
a) Courses are held in the evening during the week and during daytime on Saturdays. (In our prorgam classes are held between 19:00 and 22:00 on Mondays and Wednesdays and between 09:00 and 17:00 on Saturdays.)
b) There is no M.S. Thesis requirement, instead there is a Team Project requirement.
THE MASTER OF SCIENCE PROGRAM IN FINANCIAL ENGINEERING
The main objective of the program is to provide graduate level technical education to students who want to work in the new and growing finance industry. This includes investment banks and corporations, financial management and consulting companies, insurance companies and firms that invest in financial markets. Recent developments during the last decades have shown the need for an educational program whose graduates are equipped with the necessary tools and techniques to evaluate financial markets, determine investment strategies, as well as design, engineer and market new financial products. The topic has become more appealing with the emergence of new securities and financial instruments, like options, swaps, interest rate derivatives, credit derivatives and private retirement plans. A graduate of the program is expected to work not only in companies that market financial products, but also in the finance department of general service or manufacturing firms.
During the last few years, many respectable universities including Princeton University, Columbia University, Cornell University, University of California at Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon, among many others, have instituted MS and ME programs in financial engineering. The reason is to satisfy the growing demand initiated by the finance industry for a new MS level education in the field. We will establish the first MS program in financial engineering in a Turkish university. The academic requirements of the program need the cooperation of several disciplines like economics, management, industrial engineering and mathematics. This is obtained through the establishment of a new program that is not already available as part of a graduate program in any university in Turkey.
Students will be exposed to a technically rigorous curriculum that provides a strong base in quantitative techniques and stochastic modeling. The main emphasis is on the application of these techniques and models in financial markets through computational methods and simulation. Due to the apparent diversity of the educational program, it has an interdisciplinary structure that involves the three main schools of the university.
STUDENT PROFILE
The targeted student body mainly consists of working professionals who are graduates of engineering, business and science schools with a minimum 2-year work experience. Although work experience is recommended, it is not required and new graduates with successful academic records can also apply. The enrollment plan for the FE program is to admit 30 new students every year. In order to apply, the students should have an undergraduate degree in a technical field like engineering, mathematics, physics, operations research and statistics or in a related field like economics or management.
