UCLA Anderson Master of Financial Engineering (MFE) Program

Disappointing

What do you think is unique about this program?
Class & Anderson Faculty, lots of practical hands-on projects, possibility to do one rigorous applied finance research project with a topic I'm truly interested in, some networking opportunity.

What are the weakest points about this program?
Disappointing standard of integrity, career service, have never seen any good effort to link students with employers. internships somehow work out but full-time placement is really disappointing. Also they offer $5k as tuition remerbursement to some unpaid internships to make them 'paid'. Absolute zero contact with big banks/wall street firms. Classes are good but not all of them. No variation, everyone takes same classes. Some faculty have absolute no interest in teaching (one even submitted final grade one month after the deadline in the final quarter, yes after commencement & everything was over). Do not market your truly great faculty & their life long research for MFE program/brochure rather try to market your students/placements.

Career services
Whats career service? one comes to b-school to make direct contact with the recruiter & pays high fees. Our career director send out online links for us to apply which many of us consider as spam.If online application works, then no point to come to a good school. Most of option pricing/ interest rate calibration/models including codes are available online why pay $54k for that? career director needs to understand what computational finance is & where potential opportunity lies. Above all, she creates major confusion. 50% of the class secures paid internships (mostly in LA/SF area), rest not worth of mentioning. Full time placement is even worse. There are some big shots in the industry body but what they do regarding career placement is highly questionable.
So before you spend that huge money for tuition, think twice about your other options.

Student body
Mostly international (who will pay $54k for a degree with such a little market value).

This review was submitted anonymously

After almost a year of studies, I finally feel ready to submit a review. Currently, I feel incredibly grateful to my undergrad professors, who taught me everything which was needed to get a summer internship. Meanwhile, throughout the school year at UCLA Anderson, the amount of new material was close to none. And don't get me wrong, I came straight from the economics undergrad, not from another master's or even a full-time job. This program is a perfect place for a person who has never heard about the regression and has never learned a single programming language. I will try to explain everything in greater detail below.

Math/Statistics/Econometrics - I don't even know what to start with. Everything is taught at an elementary level. The entire time-series course was dedicated to ARMA(1,1) modeling and especially to the Fama-MacBeth regression. Almost no statistical tests, no theory explanation - nothing. The same can be said about the econometrics class, which felt like stats 101. On the other hand, the stochastic calculus class has a well-rounded curriculum, and Professor Panageas is a fantastic lecturer. And that's all: three "true math" classes on the Financial Engineering program.

Programming - *sigh*. I will start by citing my classmate: "Our program never penalizes people for inefficient implementation, which they should. I've literally seen people writing four nested "for" loops." Everything is implemented in R, and only Professor Goukasian tries to motivate people to use C++. To be honest, programming is simply not taught. Some people are still using Excel for regressions and optimization because the program does not care.

Finance part - it is not as relevant for the MFE, but I feel obliged to mention it. The program's mandatory accounting class (!!!) was taught so badly that people without the prior accounting experience almost did not get it. Fama-MacBeth model has been in so many courses, that it has become an inside joke, but still has never been adequately explained. In the Derivatives class, Professor Eisfeldt did not know the material in her own slides. For example, she barely answered any questions and was not able to explain the math formulas. It turns out that there can be a derivative of the constant, which is non-zero. Many of the classes also repeat each other a lot, which reduces the amount of new material even more. On the other hand, professor Longstaff is an amazing lecturer, and the fixed income class was one of the best at the program.

Faculty - I don't want to say any more bad things. Professors Longstaff, Goukasian, and Panageas are well-qualified and passionate about their subjects. That's what I expected from the MFE, and it is a pleasure to attend their lectures. I believe that if the curriculum had been better, the teaching would have been better, too. Currently, it feels that most of the people simply don't care.

Career Services - I've never seen decent career services. They exist here, and they do something, not like the alumni network. Very often, if you write to alumni, they would simply ignore you. Moreover, as you have probably already understood, it is an MFE degree from the business school, the MS Finance with more numbers. Therefore, be ready to work in asset management or data science if you're lucky. No quant research, no trading, no big-name firms. One more thing to mention, the school claims a productive mix of MFE and MBA - DO NOT TRUST THIS INFO. Yes, in all caps. You are excluded from the community, you do not get any perks, you can't join the clubs, and you are technically not even allowed into the student lounge.

I was extremely excited to be admitted here a year ago, and now I am thinking about a Ph.D. because I would have learned more from spending the huge tuition in the bar.

To sum up, if you have another offer or you do not need a visa - think twice before going here. Twice as two stars, which I give to the program.

I also want to finish with the two quotes I've heard recently:

The only good thing is that "Weed is legal, but that shouldn't be a concern." -- classmate

"You should have not expected anything more from the Master's program. It just serves as a paid accreditation mechanism for the job market later" -- my undergrad professor