The UC San Diego Master in Finance Program is another great addition to the MSF landscape. California is a big financial market and until recently there haven’t been many master in finance programs for students to choose from. Well with the start of USC’s MSF, Santa Clara and now UC San Diego, the choices are many.
The program consists of 4 required classes (Financial Accounting, Investment Analysis, Advanced Financial Risk Management, and Financial Econometrics and Empirical Methods). Once these 4 classes are completed MSF students can choose 8 electives, allowing students to customize their masters program to best suit their interests. The electives you can choose from are the following:
- Business Forecasting
- Behavioral Finance
- Valuation in Corporate Finance
- Real Estate Finance
- Mergers, Acquisitions, and Corporate Restructurings
- New Venture Finance
- Stochastic Calculus and Continuous Time Finance
- Financial Statement Analysis
- Computational Finance Methods
- Analyzing Large Data
- Collecting and Analyzing Financial Data
- Portfolio Analysis Theory in Practice
Additionally, there is a final capstone class that MSF students must take. This capstone class is an applied financial project which requires students to incorporate everything they have learned in the program in a real world project.
I think another really cool aspect of UC San Diego and the MSF program is the chance to learn from Harry Markowitz, PhD, winner of the Nobel Prize. A rare opportunity in deed.
Keep in mind that this program seems to be more quantitative focused (judging by their admissions criteria). I am including a quote from the website to further illustrate this.
“Undergraduate degrees in mathematics, economics, statistics, physics, engineering or computer science will be considered. Students with non-quantitative undergraduate degrees will be considered on an exceptional basis if they have five years of work history in a quantitative field.”
- Post-university work or research experience in a quantitative discipline is recommended, but not required.
- Prior exposure in computational programming (for example, C++) and familiarity with computers as a computational and risk management tool.
- Experience with statistical and econometric applications (Examples: SAS, STATA, MatLab, R, S-Plus).
- A strong quantitative background including coursework in subjects such as linear algebra, multivariate calculus, differential equations, numerical analysis and advanced statistics and probability.
- Experience with mathematical tools (Examples: MatLab, or Mathematica).
Here is a link to the UC San Diego Master in Finance Program