Learner Reviews & Feedback for Financial Engineering and Risk Management Part I by Columbia University

Interesting and well laid-out, the only improvements I would suggest are more effective ways to troubleshoot questions around the quizzes, as well as better integration of the optional sections at the end, which jump into heavy maths without practical examples, limiting the motivation for students to stick with them.

The course instructions should be more clear. The fact that week 8 is the revision material required for understanding many parts of the course is very strange. There should be also more examples of the exercises during the course than simply the test, whilst for the quiz there should be a form of better feedback.

The material is interesting, but the earlier sections require a large amount of independent research to get to the answer and the ideas are not explained in a way that tells you the purpose of the securities you are pricing, only how to price them. Towards the end of the course this gets better though.

That particular course helps me to better comprehend the mechanisms of how financial instruments work. I am really grateful to professors who lecture a material and my special thanks to mentors and tutors for their assistance on the forum - without you I will not be able to complete that course.

Great course ! Very clear materials and challenging tests. Just too much focused on mathematic formulas rather than financial principles. I would definitely reccomend it to anybody willing to learn more about derivatives and other sophisticated financial instruments in general.

I have spent lot of time on this course, it is really excellent. Due to the concentrated information, it takes more time for me to learn the subject. Everything is explained very well with detailed notes on the topics. I hope I will finish this course one-day. Thanks

Maybe some more guided exercise session would be beneficial to students. To move from theoretical lessons to practical quiz session without preparation is not good. I'd also suggest to suggest students some specific book, just to offer a more guided preparation

The entire course contents are really helpful and valuable. Professors explained the lecture clearly and the tutor was also really willing to help students with any questions. I'm going to continue taking the Financial Engineering and Risk Management Part 2.

Great course, but be ready for a substantial effort. Time allocation needed is very variable, sometimes the course expectations did not met the real time allocation, but this depends a lot on the starting skills and how used we are to computing.

I think the formulae were too technical without providing the rationale (give the starving africans a bag of rice or teach them how to grow food). The understanding of the why is important to the understanding of the formula and their use

Nice course, covers a wide aspect of materials. However, much of theories are not that easy to understand, so it would be better if the instructors could add a little bit more real-world examples/applications of these theories.

This is a well-structured course who has a basic understanding of finance and wants to steer into financial engineering. The course contents are highly relevant and examples in the spreadsheets provided are very intuitive.

Very good course for those who, like me, had never been exposed to financial engineering in the past. I strongly recommend it if you come from a technical background and are willing to develop and broaden your skills.

It is not an intro class. This course is challenging particularly when you are not an English Native. In this course the most frequently used model is binomial model that can be fairly dealt with in the Excel sheet.

Eye-opening and powerful crash course introducing to the life of a quant. Problem is in the discussion forums, where there is very little interaction with mentors and week-long (or more delays) in getting feedback.

Pretty cool course. I hope they come out with two course sequences, one based more on theory that doesn't back away from stochastic calc so much, and another on practical methods using something other than excel.

The assignments are well designed to motivate you to think and employe learnings from the course. The instructors teach skills very clearly. I liked the helper videos provided additionally with the course.

The video explain the concepts based on formula and derivation of the formula. However, i would suggest that more numerical example would lead to easy understanding for anyone from non- technical side.

Very well presented, structured and selected material, easy to follow, relevant and interesting. Quizz problems are well thought through and have a reasonable degree of difficulty and length.

Extremely hard for someone like me who is trying to do this as a complete novice, need time to understand, no feedback on quizzes so if you are stuck, you need to spend a lot of time on this

Es un curso bastante completo y bien explicado pero requieres de una base previa de conocimientos matemáticos y financieros para poder sacarle el mayor provecho. Lo recomiendo ampliamente.

Great course for knowledge. Still in some part of the course, the course content and level of graded questions doesn't match. At least not all but should have given insights about it.

Good content, especially liked how professor Haugh explained things. Some assignments could have clearer instructions - but discussion forums are useful to troubleshoot the problems.

Some of the models are not what's really used on the street. e.g. Street uses SABR and Black-73 to price swaptions. The quiz instruction is also a bit amibious for some questions.

A lot of the concepts got hidden in numeric outcomes. I understand why the format made that necessary, but it led to time intensive homeworks on relatively simple concepts.