Rutgers quants win regional risk management challenge for third straight year

For the third year in a row, Rutgers Master of Quantitative Finance students won first place in the Professional Risk Managers’ International Association (PRMIA) Regional Risk Management competition.  The PRMIA Risk Management Challenge (PRMC) provides undergraduate and graduate students from multiple disciplines the opportunity to solve realistic business problems with a risk management focus. Ultimately, PRMC aims to develop and strengthen professional and social relationships between students, faculty, and risk professionals. The competition is open to students near participating PRMIA Chapters in the EU, US and Canada.    

The Rutgers Master of Quantitative Finance program is a unique and exciting degree program incorporating math, statistics, coding, stochastic processes, numerical methods technical writing, data, AI and good communications skills.  The program is designed to prepare students for employment in this interdisciplinary, technologically sophisticated, specialized field.

“The PRMIA Risk Competition is a great way to learn about the broader perspectives in risk management in the corporate world,” the team said.

The case consisted of evaluating risks to a pending corporate takeover of an agricultural company, including hedging grain production and purchasing insurance. This required the team to consider a wide variety of factors and sift through many models and data to solve the issues presented. With the help of their advisor, Ronnee Ades, they were able to condense all of it down to an effective written summary and presentation which impressed the judges.

Together, the team felt that “The comprehensive nature of risk assessment in the competition helped us appreciate the many different components to risk that a large corporation would examine. We hope that the things we learned in the regionals will be effective and help us with the case we are required to solve (and hopefully win!) in the final round at the end of March.”

Professor Yangru Wu is the director of the MQF program and Ronnee Ades advised the RBS-MQF team through the PRMIA Risk Management Challenge.  The team (from left to right): Aleksandr Hartunian, Yiming Guo, Anirudh Ramesh, and Zhuolin Li next head to the global finals.