March 2021 Updates from Dr. Ionut Florescu

Dear students and colleagues,

Welcome to the monthly introductory piece. I will keep it short as I know most of you have to deal with assignments and midterms. Many of which I assigned ;). First, I want to remind everyone that the course registration for the summer semester starts on March 29. The registration for the fall semester classes starts on April 6 and it will be done for the first time ever via Workday student. The last day to drop courses this semester is April 28, 2021.

Second, there are some exciting news and connections between schools and programs both in NJ and outside the country. We started a program like AMP with Seton Hall. We are working with the undergraduate students in the Mathematics and Computer Science there and facilitating them finishing a Master in FE or FA in just one year.
The next link discusses this program.
https://www.stevens.edu/news/business-finance-analytics-seton-hall-grad-21

Next, we signed an agreement with Keio University in Tokyo, one of the largest private Business Schools in Japan https://www.keio.ac.jp/en/ The agreement is very similar with the one with Seton Hall. The business school is working on a press release (which will give me material for next month, lol). This is the first agreement Stevens has made with a school in Japan and the first US school Keio has connected with (they are focused on European schools).

We revamped the Financial Analytics Master program to provide concentrations in Fintech / Machine Learning, Data Science / Optimization and Advanced Risk Analytics. We also streamlined the program to not include prerequisite classes. I will discuss more next month but is important to note changes will apply next fall and the existing students are grandfathered in (i.e., it is their choice to follow a concentration or use their existing plan).

Our SHIFT competition is starting officially on March 19 with the Info session. This year we have available prizes to the first three placed teams thanks to our sponsor CAPCO. We decided to keep it internal for one more year, next year hopefully no more pandemic and we can go national. So far it looks like the competition will be over-subscribed again which shows how much our students care about learning. Nonetheless, I am glad my name is not Zhiyuan Yao (the competition boss).

For undergraduate and graduate students not going on a summer internship, it is a good idea to contact your favorite professor and ask about any summer projects they may have. Your Stevens professors are extremely hard working, and they all have very cool projects. Summer is typically the time for research, however most of our students go on internships. Last summer because of COVID we had a lot of students participating in research projects. I hope you all get internships but mentioning it just in case.

I guess I cannot be brief…

Ionut Florescu
Director Hanlon Laboratories
Hoboken, March 2021