testarossa

So have you decided where are you going next year yet ?

contingent credit default swaps i guess ...

I believe Columbia's yield rate is pretty low. I also got the call like 2 weeks ago and tried to use my other acceptances as a leverage to get scholarship from them and haven't heard anything yet.....

I am denying it.

MBAs and quants work on two different sides of finance, that requires two entirely different sets of skills. OR route is more on the academic type of job such as modeling or programming as direcdingo said while MBA route is more about business aspect. It's often very hard for OR graduates to get trading jobs because it's traditionally for MBA graduates and vice versa. Certainly there would be exceptions for people who fall in between. It's understandable that people from academia often make fun of business people. And also, OR jobs often are not directly account for the profit of the firm so don't expect a large size bonus out of them.

I don't know. It's been quiet for a while. Are you in the waiting list because I know a lot of people are going to reject their offer.

I didn't mean that the department treats non-FE badly. In fact, from what I heard, there is no discrepancies between FE students and OR students at all, except on your degree. What I meant was that the majority of professors at Columbia IEOR do FE-related research (70%). If you are interested in something like Logistics or Supply Chain or Applied OR as such, the opportunity to do research as well as to discuss with professors who are in the field is limited. Columbia is better than Cornell in FE-releated field and maybe less competitive in other fields of OR. Again, this is what I heard from someone else who went to Columbia. He might be bias.

A friend of mine who went to undergrad and MSOR at Columbia said the department focuses mainly on Financial Engineering and other OR fields are not as competitive. For someone like him and many other people who are interested in other fields of OR, there are better programs such as GaTech or Cornell or MIT. (Princeton's OR also focuses mainly on FE) For me, I think I am 80% sure that I will attend Stanford unless Columbia offers me some scholarship, which I highly doubt.

I mean the acceptance rate for people who got admits and actually went there.

I was contacted by Columbia MSOR today by email, asking me to call them for a quick interview. So I called and were asked about what are my other admits and whether Columbia is my first choice. It seems Columbia is really struggling to retain good candidates. I guess their acceptance rate was really low last year.

Seadub is right. Since there are 8 different tracks and they are very distinctive (Environment, Finance, Entrepreneurship .... ) unlike Columbia (OR, EMS, IE, FE), you can divide the total number by 8, making each track has 30 students which is a fairly good class size. @Souman: Congratulation with all the admits. Columbia's MFE is very prestigious, at least on top 5. It is the crown jewel of Columbia IEOR department, on par with Princeton Math Fin and Baruch MFE (though overrated). However, I would strongly suggest to go to Columbia MFE if you are not Asian because Columbia has a lot of MSOR Asian (150+) also concentrating in FE. You'd have to compete with all of them for job. Otherwise, if you are Asian, Cornell is better IMO. Here is link to 2 reviews, one for Columbia's MFE and one for Cornell's FE Columbia: http://www.quantnet.com/review-of-columbia-university-financial-engineering-program Cornell: http://www.quantnet.com/review-cornell-financial-engineering-program

Stanford MS&E department is the result of a merging among 3 different departments: Dep. of Industrial Engineering, Dep. of Engineering Management and Dep. of Economic System and Operations Research. The department have 36 faculty members compared with 19 faculty members of Columbia IEOR so the student-faculty ratio at Stanford is a little bit better. But as you said, it's still a huge number. We can't deny that both programs are intended as cash cow. If the the numbers from pittman is correct, it's now even harder to choose between Stanford and Columbia ....

The entire department has 284 MS and 108 PhD students, .... they can't possibly double their department size source: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/MSandE/cgi-bin/academics/studentinfo.php

Where did you get this statistics ?

Yea, I've met people graduated from Stanford and they are definitely more engineer-oriented and their perspective are somewhat different from people graduated from Ivies. Does anyone know about grade inflation/deflation and difficulties at both programs (Stanford, Columbia) ?