Research Opportunities at Sloan

Sloan has a project called “The MIT Sloan Sponsored Thesis Project”, a curriculum in which external sponsors propose topics and provide resources for Master’s students seeking to write theses (by the way, the Master’s theses are optional for MFin students).  The research typically takes place over the course of one semester, and may be conducted at MIT or on site at the sponsor’s offices.  There are no restrictions on the kinds of topics that may be proposed for a sponsored thesis, other than they must have sufficient intellectual content to justify a Master’s thesis, and an MIT Sloan faculty member must agree to serve as the faculty advisor and approve the thesis upon completion.  Sponsors are expected to provide support in the form of research funds, data, and periodic access to personnel with expertise in the thesis topic.

Recently I have received the information of a project titled "Risk Measurement and Asset Allocation" with Pension Reserves Investment Management ("PRIM"). The faculty advisors would be Andrew Lo and/or Mark Kritzman. Students are required to evaluate new approaches to risk measurement that extend beyond variance and end-of-horizon probability of loss, thus to develop a rationalization for PRIM’s current asset allocation.

Besides “The MIT Sloan Sponsored Thesis Project”, an MFin student can also get research opportunities through courses of Proseminar of Financial Management and Proseminar of Financial Engineering, which have been introduced in my previous blogpost-About courses, or IAP Finance practicum. Plus we can always be proactive, approach to professors and pitch your research ideas.  

Finally, I have to say: this is only the second week of the spring semester, and I have three cases and one essay due next week. It's so gonna be a FUN weekend!

MIT150 Econ & Finance Symposium: From Theory to Practice to Policy

Left to right: Myers, Scholes, Merton, Cox and Ross

On Thursday, Jan. 27, and Friday, Jan. 28, I attended the MIT 150 Economics and Finance symposium, one of a number of events to be held to celebrate MIT’s 150 anniversary. 

The panels on the first day mainly focused on economics, specifically, on recent advance in the modeling of household and firm behavior, macroeconomics and growth, current policy challenges facing the global economic systems and regulatory policy design. The second day focused on Finance with two morning panels: the first on the development and evolution of financial technology; the second on finance in practice and current challenges.  Among all the panelists, seven are Nobel prize winners. 

My name tag

I was particularly excited about the first morning session on the second day, which included Scholes, Merton, Cox, Myers and Ross -- the five founding fathers of finance. Andrew Lo was the moderator. He mentioned that when he was in high school, he usually dropped and picked up his sister at MIT with his parents. He was pretty impressed by the fact that all the buildings at MIT are indentified only by numbers. His sister told him that there is actually a logic to the numbering. The numerical value of the building is inversely proportional to the significance of the department in that building. Building one is the president’s office, Building two is the mathematic’ s, the foundation of all the sciences. Years later, once he got the offer from MIT Sloan, he asked the dean “ excuse me, but what is the number of Sloan building?” as we all know it was 51, and it’s now getting worse, E62.:D I actually heard this opening speech on the first day of our program, but still laughed when he said this second time. Now, Andrew Lo is teaching us Analytics of Finance II, which I considered was one the coolest course at Sloan. He is very articulate so the course won’t be as boring as its name at all. 

Nobel laureate Robert Merton, who teaches us two courses this semester, delivered Friday's keynote on the future of finance.