This monograph aims to educate and inspire advanced undergraduate and MBA students to consider quantitative finance as a career path. The risk–return tradeoff articulated by Harry Markowitz and William Sharpe applies not only to stocks and portfolios, but also to career decisions. As a result, coursework in Financial Engineering, Investments, and Corporate Finance can substantially enhance lifetime earnings. The financial and statistical techniques introduced in this monograph—such as optimization, regression, and time-series analysis—are highly rewarded in today's marketplace, where industry seeks intelligent, diligent, and professional candidates with strong academic performance. Using robust-regression-based stock selection models, this monograph estimates and analyzes the resulting Efficient Frontiers over the 1997–2020 period using the WRDS database, and over the 1997–2022 period using commercially available databases. These applied methodologies are highly valued by leading financial institutions.
