Course content
Double Degree Data & Finance X-HEC
The program offers you a perfect balance of theory and practice of both data science and finance years. Four elective courses allow you to customize the curriculum to your needs and aspirations. The students who go through the Data & Finance program obtain the MSc&T degree from Ecole Polytechnique and the MIF degree from Ecole Polytechnique.
The key aim of this Double Degree is to allow students to have not only the state-of-the-art toolkits in data and finance, but also have solid field-specific foundations so as to acquire the intuitions that come with both areas. As such, our students become experts of both data science and financial economics in general and capital markets in particular, so as to be able to tackle very complicated problems that are at the crossroads of both areas.
Course Portfolio
The first year teaching focuses largely on the data produced by ‘real-life’ cases obtained in association with the program’s industrial partners. Students will learn how to perform a complete data analysis, from data manipulation, exploration, and visualization to analysis with powerful machine learning methods and to communicate and deploy their solution. Students can also benefit from refresher courses in probability and mathematical foundations of data science.
- Mathematical foundations of data science
- Statistics with R
- Regression
- Machine Learning I and II
- Deep Learning and Optimization
- Python for data science
- Financial markets
- Optimization / Deep Learning
- Numerical processing of financial data
- Deep learning in finance
- Languages
- Human science
- Sport
A 4-month compulsory internship within a company in a data-related sector, including investment banks (BNP-Paribas, BPCE), hedge funds and firms such as Microsoft, Facebook, Orange, Capgemini.
Learn & develop your skills in AI & Datascience
Meet other students,DataScientists and professionals from companies who will coach you
Contribute to solve real issues for companies and society
Superhands-on experience to highlighting your CV
Compete with the best students in a good spirit
Get the chance to spend a day into of the corporate donors office
During your second year, you will join HEC Paris’s Master in International Finance program, which has been at the top of the world rankings by the Financial Times for over a decade now. During the first half of the Fall semester you will go through one of the two Core Course blocks (via the Accelerated Track or the Business Track depending on your background) to ensure that all students have intermediate-level finance and financial accounting knowledge before proceeding further (being in the Accelerated or Business Track makes no difference for what follows the rest of the program).
In the second half of the Fall semester you will be in the Capital Markets Specialization. In the Spring semester you will join the Data & Finance Concentration: in this course block you will take classes on Blockchains; Algorithms, Data and Trading; Data Analysis in Finance; and Numerical Analysis. You will also take additional Advanced Core Courses in finance and follow an elective course among 25+ on offer. During the same period you will work on your Research Paper with a fellow student under the supervision of a faculty member. You will also have the option (but not the obligation) to take one of the ten Certificate Programs on offer during the month of May. HEC Paris-side professional experience (internship) requirements can be, under certain conditions, fulfilled with the first-year internship completed while at Ecole Polytechnique.
For the Accelerated Track (AT):
- Corporate Finance 1&2
- Securities Markets 1&2
- Financial Accounting & Reporting
- Empirical Methods in Finance 2
For the Business Track (BT):
- Corporate Finance 2
- Securities Markets 2
- Financial Statement Analysis
- Empirical Methods in Finance 1
- International Finance
*Please note that the coursework listed above is subject to change without prior notice upon the Academic Director’s discretion if the need for such a change arises in his opinion.
- Securities Markets 3
- Financial Engineering
- Quantitative Asset Management
- Fixed income and Money Markets
- Bond Portfolio Management
*Please note that the coursework listed above is subject to change without prior notice upon the Academic Director’s discretion if the need for such a change arises in his opinion.
- Economics of Financial Regulation
- Behavioral & Sustainable Finance
*Please note that the coursework listed above is subject to change without prior notice upon the Academic Director’s discretion if the need for such a change arises in his opinion.
Data & Finance
- Algorithm, Data & Trading
- Blockchain
- Numerical Analysis
- Data Analysis in Finance
*Please note that the coursework listed above is subject to change without prior notice upon the Academic Director’s discretion if the need for such a change arises in his opinion.
- Alternative Investments
- AI & Investment Management
- AI & Decision Making
- AI for Quantitative Trading Strategies
- Energy Markets
- ESG Measurement & Reporting
- Exotic Products & Structuring 1 or 2
- Foreign Exchange Derivatives Trading
- Infrastructure and Real Assets’ PE
- Modelling Techniques for Financial Engineering
- Sustainable & Responsible Investing
- Stochastic Processes
- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Equity Research
- ...
**Some of the courses on this list may not be available due to seat or scheduling limitations.
At the beginning of September, students have the opportunity to go on a study trip to London. The trip offers students plenty of networking opportunities, conferences and team building exercises. Many networking events are organized with HEC Alumni’s UK branch - one of the largest in the world, with numerous active members working in the City.
The annual London study trip includes events with companies such as:
- Amber Capital
- Bank of America
- Barclays
- Blackstone
- Bloomberg
- BNP
- CD&R
- Chenavari
- Crédit Agricole
- D'Angelin & Co
- Deutsche Bank
- HG Capital
- IK Partners
- L-GAM
- Macquarie
- Morgan Stanley
- Citibank
- Goldman Sachs
- Oaktree
- Point 72.
- Houlihan Lokey
- Natixis
- PSP Investments
- Rotschild
- SFO Capital Partners
- Société Générale
- Starwood
- Towerbrook
- The Raine Group
- UBS
- …
By the end of this program, you will be a highly skilled data scientist and a highly knowledgeable financial economist who specializes in capital markets. You will be able to tackle the most complicated challenges that are at the crossroads of data and finance for a FinTech company, a hedge fund, a PE or VC, a large bank, an asset management company, a financial regulator, …
- Master in Data & Finance students must write a research paper (that generates 20 of the 140 ECTS needed for the degree) under the supervision of an HEC Paris faculty in finance (supervisors other than those designated by the Academic Director must be approved by the latter).
- The objective of the Research Paper is to explore how the knowledge accumulated during both years of the program can be used to examine an interesting research question and generate a well-structured piece of writing to answer it.
- The research paper is written by pairs of students on a topic agreed upon by academic supervisor and the Academic Director of the program.
- The Research Paper must involve a research question, a literature review, conjecture/hypothesis formulation, data collection, empirical testing of one or more the hypotheses, and an interpretation of the findings’ economic as well as statistical significance.
- The Research Paper must be defended in front of a Finance Department faculty member.
- The Research Paper should ideally involve an original idea that was never tested before, or can replicate an existing paper at the crossroads of data & finance (in part or in full) using new data. The writing must be original (i.e., must be the student-pair authors’ own text).
- Exams, homeworks, quizzes
- Case studies
- Business and role-playing games
- Online/in-person group projects
- Presentations, pitches
- Master Research Paper
Faculty
The HEC Paris faculty consists of over 160 professors, comprising more than 25 different nationalities, with Ph.D.’s from leading universities across the world. They work in all major areas of economics and management.
Find out moreDisability Program for Learners
This program is adapted and open to people with disabilities.
Click here to find out more about the HEC Paris Disability Mission
Contact us : esh@hec.fr