For me the beauty of the MFM at the University of Minnesota is that it combines the theoretical foundation and applied knowledge you need to “hit the ground running” in your first job in quant finance. The curriculum delves deeply into programming and modeling within the finance domain. I got my first internship at U.S. Bank mainly because of my strong programming skills. Programming still helps me in my job today because it's crucial to be able to transfer ideas/algorithms into something (code) that actually works and solves the problem.  Our MFM covers a wide set of topics in the financial industry and very rigorous mathematical training critical for quantitative finance. For example, the Libor Market Model (covered in the coursework) is really all about stochastic differential equations. This is a model we use in daily production at the Wells Fargo.