Financial engineering activities are concentrated in the financial services industry where financial engineering departments have been created and financial engineering positions have been designated. Increasingly, however, a demand for competent financial engineers is also found in treasury departments of nonfinancial corporations and in public institutions. On the capital market side, financial engineers are responsible for structuring and marketing complex financial products, developing sophisticated trading and risk management strategies, and engineering solutions to a wide variety of complex financial problems faced by corporations, state and local governments, international agencies, and sovereign governments. On the operations side, financial engineers interface between the capital market personnel and the technologists responsible for supplying the full range of technological support that is vital to the proper functioning of a modern financial marketplace. Polytechnic's graduate program in Financial Engineering has been designed to provide the skills required to operate at the cutting-edge of financial engineering in today's financial services industry.
Separate tracks make it possible to pursue careers in capital markets or in operations.
The program is rigorous, demanding, and selective. Graduates of the capital markets track are expected to seek positions in financial risk management groups, in trading and arbitrage desks, in product structuring groups, in derivatives groups, in investment banking departments, and in the information technology firms that support the trading operations in financial institutions. Graduates of the operations track are best viewed as technology generalists with sufficient knowledge of both information technology and financial theory and practice that they can serve as the interface between capital markets personnel and technical specialist in telecommunications and computer science. Graduates are expected to seek positions in commercial banks, investment banks, thrifts, insurance companies, investment companies, pension funds, finance companies, consulting firms, accounting firms with consulting practices, and so forth. Courses ending in even numbers are full-semester courses.