Master of Science in Finance

Successful finance experts need to understand how the industry’s key players—commercial and investment banks, investment management companies, hedge funds, private equity firms, and regulatory agencies—operate, thrive, and even fail. A Master of Science in Finance degree can help you understand and succeed, even in volatile financial conditions.

At Illinois Institute of Technology’s Stuart School of Business, you’ll study in a nationally ranked M.S. in finance program that is located in Chicago—home to the world’s largest markets in financial derivatives. 

In your M.S.F. courses, you’ll learn the latest industry-relevant concepts and technologies from finance professors who are both practitioners and scholars, bringing their career knowledge and understanding of the markets directly to the classroom. 

Stuart School of Business is a global leader in bridging technology and business, offering distinctive education that trains students to become outstanding professionals in economics, finance, analytics, marketing, business, public administration, operations, and management. 

Finance and Economics at Illinois Tech have a prestigious history that dates back to the late 1800s, with some of the nation’s first courses in "Family and Consumer Science" (including “Home Economics” and “Household Management”) being offered by the Lewis Institute, Stuart’s original home, and the Institute’s subsequent formation of the Department of Business and Economics in 1926.

Over a period of more than 125 years, building on curricular innovations by Julia A. Beveridge and George N. Carman, and on foundational scholarly works by trailblazing Illinois Tech scholars Herb A. Simon (author of Administrative Behavior, later awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics), Karl Menger (developer of the St. Petersburg paradox in economics) and Abe Sklar (developer of the Copula in financial modeling), the Stuart School of Business has refined education in business disciplines.

A long-standing leader in curricular innovation, in 1990, building on the foundational works of numerous Illinois Tech scholars, and Harold L. Stuart’s own contributions to finance and the broader business community, the Stuart School of Business established quantitative finance as an academic discipline, with a world’s first postgraduate Master’s program in Financial Markets and Trading – a program that highlighted a new model for embedding into a postgraduate academic program the emphases on career readiness and connectedness with the business community, and transformed business school education.

Today, the Master of Science in Finance continues Stuart's tradition of being a frontier innovator in the finance discipline, offering students outstanding concentrations and curricular and co-curricular opportunities that place them on the path to success.

Curriculum

The Master of Science in Finance program requires 33 credit hours (11 courses) of graduate work. Students have the option to choose a concentration or design their own.
 

MASTER OF FINANCE CURRICULUM

Core Courses18
Mathematics with Financial Applications3
Statistical Analysis in Financial Markets3
Financial Modeling3
Valuation and Portfolio Management3
Futures, Options, and OTC Derivatives3
Financial Statement Analysis3
Choose a concentration of 3 courses9
Mathematical Finance
Investments3
Theory of Finance I3
Theory of Finance II3
Financial Technology
Machine Learning for Finance and Business3
High Frequency Finance and Technology3
Global Markets and Technology3
Portfolio Management
Asset Valuation3
Quantitative Portfolio Management3
Fixed Income Portfolio Management3
Risk Management
Market Risk Management3
Credit Risk Management3
Time Series Analysis3
Quantitative Modeling and Trading
Models for Derivatives3
Term Structure Modeling and Interest Rate Derivatives3
Energy Commodities Analytics and Trading3
Custom Concentration - requires program director approval
Corporate Finance and Valuation
Corporate Finance3
Investment Banking and Venture Capital3
Asset Valuation3
Choose from the following electives or from courses listed in the concentrations shown above6
Entrepreneurial Finance3
Special Topics in Finance3
Independent Study in Finance3

Minimum degree credits required: 33

Core Requirement

All Master of Science in Finance students must complete the six core classes unless they have obtained written permission from the program director to substitute an alternative class for a core class.

Free Electives

Up to two graduate-level electives may be taken from outside the courses prescribed above. These electives may be taken from other offerings at the Stuart School of Business, the Chicago-Kent College of Law, or Mies Campus graduate programs, provided that:

  1. They are consistent with the Master of Science in Finance program objectives.
  2. They have been approved, prior to the student’s registration, by the Master of Science in Finance program director or the student’s academic adviser.