About courses

We just finished our last final exam on Thursday, so I’m going to summarize some courses I took this semester. Besides two compulsory courses, Analytics of Finance and Corporate Financial Accounting, I have also taken Investments, Proseminar in Financial Engineering and Proseminar in Financial Management. For most of time, MFin students have the same classes with second year finance track MBA students.

Basically Analytics of Finance covers the main quantitative finance topics, including derivative pricing using stochastic calculus, dynamic optimization, and econometrics. This course is pretty important especially for people who will do trading, quant research or asset management in the future. For people who will do investment banking, like me, it can provide a framework to think about IPO or valuation.

Investments is case-based, covering a broad range of topics from optimized fee structure for hedge fund to university endowment management. Professor of this course also invited chairman of CMO and co-founder of Protege Partners to give in-class talks.

Two proseminars are my favorite courses this semester. Professor of Financial Engineering is President and CEO of Windham Capital Management, who also serves as a Senior Partner of State Street Associates. During this course, students will work in team on “live” projects regarding trading programming, quant research and portfolio construction, and then present a report to the project's sponsor and to the proseminar. In this semester, most of sponsors are buy-side firms like PIMCO and BlackRock. My project was about fixed income trading strategy based on yield curve prediction (By the way, James, another student writing this blog, worked on this project,too.) As for projects in Financial Management, they are more qualitative, regarding valuation and M&A. Sponsors are mainly sell-side firms, including BofA Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan and Citi. I just learned as much from the other teams' presentations as from the projects I worked on in both proseminars.

Next semester, I will take Valuation taught by Mayer, Retirement Finance taught by Merton, Business Analysis and Valuation using Financial Statements, Economics of Health Care Industries, Business Law Tilted Towards Finance and Entrepreneurial Finance. Some other courses taken by my classmates include Advanced Corporate Risk Management, Negotiation, Marketing, Competitive Strategy, Global Economic Challenge and so on. There are just so many choices that I wish the course credit limit could be infinite.