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Hisham Osman discovered WorldQuant University in 2021 and took a risk. Despite working full-time in the oil and gas industry while juggling responsibilities as a father, he decided to enroll in the Master of Science in Financial Engineering program.

Hisham liked the coursework so much that he recommended it to his brother, Mahmoud Osman. The rest is history. Hisham graduated in 2023 and Mahmoud finished two years later in the class of 2025. Now they are quant brothers with skills in data science, machine learning, and econometric modeling.

Both siblings took an unconventional path to WQU. The brothers grew up in Egypt surrounded by opportunities in oil and gas. Hisham pursued mechanical engineering and Mahmoud launched a career in process control engineering.

Financial engineers deal with investment, not industrial manufacturing, but Mahmoud says he quickly discovered overlaps at WQU.

“This program significantly strengthened my ability to design, evaluate, and deploy models — skills I actively apply in my current work as a process control engineer,” he says.

Mahmoud also enjoyed collaborating with classmates from all over the world.

“One of the most valuable aspects of this experience was working in global teams across multiple time zones,” he says. “Collaborating with talented professionals from different backgrounds taught me how to communicate complex ideas clearly and work efficiently in distributed teams.”

Hisham, who is based in Dubai, continues to apply his WQU knowledge at NOV, an oil-and-gas services company.

“The program was exactly what I was looking for,” he says. “It was a no-brainer.”